Mod_Rewrite is giving 500 server error .htaccess

Question

I don't know why but when use the follow RewriteRule in my .htaccess file I am getting a Internal Server Error 500. I have mod_rewrite enabled I've been looking for a solution all day.

# Enable Rewriting  
RewriteEngine on  
# Rewrite user URLs 
RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ users\/$1\/index.php

Answer 1

Most likely the 500 error is due to a redirect loop.

You rewrite ANY request to users/$1/index.php including that very URL itself so you end up with a rewrite loop.

Try changing your rewrite rules to this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/users
RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ users/$1/index.php

By checking that the URI doesn't begin with /users you can avoid the rewrite loop.

Answer 2

Apache's error log (often named errors.log ) probably provides more info about why it doesn't work. Most likely the regular expression is invalid for some reason, I'm going to test it myself and then edit this post.

Answer 3

You have an internal rewrite loop. The rewrite engine takes a URI and puts it through the engine and gets a resulting URI. If they are the same, the rewrite engine stops, otherwise, it takes the URI it got back and puts it back through the engine . This means your /users/something/index.php is matching ^(.*)/?$ again and getting turned into: /users/users/something/index.php/index.php , then /users/users/users/something/index.php/index.phpusers/something/index.php/index.php etc. etc.

So you need to add a RewriteCond to prevent URI's from getting re-rewritten when they already start with users/ :

# Enable Rewriting  
RewriteEngine on  
# Don't rewrite if URI starts with "users"
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !users/
# Rewrite user URLs 
RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ users\/$1\/index.php