Apache RewriteRule RegEx not working as intended

Question

I want to rewrite the URLs:

/Files/ANYFILENAMEHERE?token=ANYTOKENHERE

to

/do_download.php?file=ANYFILENAMEHERE&token=ANYTOKENHERE

For this I am using the following rule in my .htaccess :

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^Files\/([^\?]+)\?token=([a-z0-9]+)$ do_download.php?file=$1&token=$2 [L]

However, the URL does not get rewritten. It just returns a 404 error. On Regex101 in PCRE mode however it matches for some reason.

Why is this and how can I fix this? Am I doing a stupid mistake somewhere?

My Apache version is 2.2.31 (Unix) btw.

Answer 1

You cannot match for the query string in a rewrite rule.

Try this instead:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} token=([^&]+)(&|$)
RewriteRule ^Files/(.+) /do_download.php?file=$1&token=%1

Here the rewrite condition looks for the token in the query string while the rewrite rule handles the filename.