.htaccess rewrite every request to index.php

Question

I'm using .htaccess for the first time and I'm encountering a loop problem. I'm trying to achieve the following:

1. http://something.com rewrites to http://something.com/main

2. http://something.com/anything rewrites to http://something.com/index.php?page=anything

So far my current attempt looks like this, which works satisfactorily:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^/?$ /main [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?page=$1 [NC,L]

However, I would like to remove both rewrite conditions to also allow requests to http://something.com/index.php to become http://something.com/index.php?page=index.php . Removing the two RewriteCond lines results in a loop and the rewrite doesn't work.

What am I doing wrong and how can I fix the problem? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can remove those conditions but you would need to reverse your rules and remove leading / from target URIs:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?page=$1 [QSA,L]

RewriteRule ^/?$ main [L]

Also remember that now your first rule will also rewrite css/js/image requests to index.php?page=... . If you want to avoid that then add this condition before first RewriteRule :

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(?:jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|ico|tiff|css|js)$ [NC]