Wordpress Multisite .htaccess .. please explain the functionality

Question

What is this .htaccess file doing??? I don't know anything about .htaccess .please help.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

Answer 1

RewriteEngine On

This turns on the rewrite engine, all the rules get ignored if this isn't in the htaccess file

RewriteBase /

This tells the rewrite engine that relative URL-paths should use this as its base

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

This rule means: "If the request is index.php , then pass it through the rewrite engine and stop rewriting"

RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

This rule matches against <some stuff> then wp-admin , and redirects the browser to the same URL except it ends with a slash. Example: http://example.com/foo/bar/wp-admin gets redirected to http://example.com/foo/bar/wp-admin/

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]

This rule says if the request is for a file or directory that exists, pass it through the rewrite engine and stop rewriting.

RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]

This rule matches against <some stuff> then wp-content or wp-admin or wp-includes , and rewrites the URI to everything after the <some stuff > Example: http://example.com/blah/blah/wp-admin/some/more gets rewritten to /wp-admin/some/more .

RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]

This rule matches against <some stuff> followed by any php file, and rewrites the URI to everything after the <some stuff> . Example: http://example.com/abc/123/somefile.php gets rewritten to /somefile.php .

RewriteRule . index.php [L]

Finally, if none of the other rules got applied, this rule rewrite everything else to /index.php .