Codeigniter, URL Routing is failing

Question

With a codeigniter codebase I've inherited, I'm attempting to get url routing up and running but it only seems to throw 404 errors.

When I go to http://root_url/index.php it hits the default controller/method just fine, however when I request any specifically controller/action, it 404s.

If I request http://root_url/index.php/auth/login apache throws

File does not exist: /var/www/ci_project/index.php/auth/login, referer: http://root_url/index.php

It looks like apache is trying to request a folder that obviously doesn't exist instead of supplying the uri segments of auth/login to the index.php

Notes:

• I'm not using any htaccess file(the codebase should work without one)
• mod_rewrite is enabled and is detected by php though I suspect the problem is occuring before hitting php
• I'm using debian(w/ apache 2.2.2) as opposed to ubuntu(2.2.14) where it does work
• Query string arguments work fine, it's just the URI segments
• I'm not attempting to remove index.php, just get the basic controller url matching working

Answer 1

It actually turned out to be an apache configuration issue on debian and nothing particularly to do with codeigniter at all.

I did a purge/re-install of apache and that appeared to fix the issue.

sudo apt-get purge apache2 apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2-common
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

My only guess as to why the problem occured is that I had the libapache2-mod-php5filter (which I didn't realise till purging occured) instead of the libapache2-mod-php5 package installed and it simply didn't handle the urls correctly.

Thanks for the help.