Apache RewriteRule to rewrite subdirectories not working

Question

I need to rewrite the following URL structure:

http://website.com/business-directory/25/administration/

to:

http://website.com/departments/administration/

I added this RewriteCond and RewriteRule but I cannot get this to work.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} website.com
RewriteRule ^business-directory/.*/(.*)/$ /departments/$1/

I have been testing with this online tool and I get successful results. But I don't know the logic they have behind the tool to validate rules.

https://htaccess.madewithlove.be?share=11bb2f4c-7d70-5ee9-9551-2d81d5a5d340

I'm still new to Linux and Apache so my troubleshooting skills are limited. I have tried to search the error_log files and pipe all the rewrite entries with grep using this command, but there are no log entries. I am watching the logs in real time as I hit URLs that should be rewritten.

tail -f error_log|fgrep '[rewrite:'

That comes directly from the Apache user manual.

The stack I am running is Bitnami Wordpress Multisite.

Answer 1

You've actually got a couple of problems. It looks like you want to convert business-directory/NN/name/ to departments/name/ . As I said, you're requiring a trailing forward slash after the department name. which is fine, but it will only rewrite the exact match to business-directory/NN/name/ and will fail with business-directory/NN/name/whosdead.html . If you want to convert all URLs, you will need to capture whatever trails the department name:

RewriteRule ^business-directory/.*?/(.*?)(/.+?)?$ /departments/$1$2

Converts http://website.com/business-directory/62/coroner to http://website.com/departments/coroner

Converts http://website.com/business-directory/62/coroner/ to http://website.com/departments/coroner/

Converts http://website.com/business-directory/62/coroner/whosdead.html to http://website.com/departments/coroner/whosdead.html .

Once you verify the rewrite engine is actually processing your rules, try this RewriteCond to see if it works better.