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I am trying to use lessn, a url shortener by Shaun Inman, on my lighttpd server and he uses a .htaccess file for the redirect. I am not very good with Mod_Rewrite isn the first place otherwise some simple googling would have sufficed to convert this for lighttpd. As it is, I do not know what the 2nd and 3rd lines of the Mod_Rewrite are doing, so I cannot convert. I'd appreciate anyone's advice on those so I can have it working as it should. Thank you!

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine   on
    RewriteCond     %{REQUEST_FILENAME}     !-d
    RewriteCond     %{REQUEST_FILENAME}     !-f
    RewriteRule     (.*) index.php?token=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
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Haha, I am and will be still be trying to figure this out in the meantime, and I just realized that I don't really understand the 4th line either (at least the (.*) and [QSA,L] parts). – JonKratz Jun 26 '11 at 20:59
ok, this page - packtpub.com/article/migration-from-apache-to-Lighttpd is helpful, but it seems like the rewrite rule has to be handled by a cgi script? – JonKratz Jun 26 '11 at 21:07
The (.*) is a regular expression (regex) to match everything and the QSA stands for "query string append" which is anything after the ? in a URL, the L indicates this is the last line of the rewrite rule that should run if there is a match to the regex. – baraboom Jun 26 '11 at 21:09
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These two lines instruct Apache's mod_rewrite to NOT apply the rewrite rule to files (f) and directories (d) that physically exist on the file system:

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

For a long time, lighttpd did not support this behavior out of the box and you had to use mod_magnet with a lua script, like this example:

http://drupal.org/node/43782

However, it looks like there is support now:

http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/wiki/Docs:ModRewrite#urlrewrite-repeat-if-not-file

So, just use that rewrite construct in your lighttpd.conf, something like:

url.rewrite-if-not-file = (
  "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php?q=$1"
)

Hope this helps and good luck!

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Thank you, that was exactly what I needed! In case anyone is searching this later for lessn, the above code should be url.rewrite-if-not-file = ( "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php?token=$1" ) – JonKratz Jun 26 '11 at 21:16
Also, the working directory for lessn ( yourdoma.in/- ) needs to have the default page (index.php) work, so you need to make the entire line this: url.rewrite-if-not-file = ( "^/-/([^\?]*)(\?(.*))?$" => "/-/$1/index.php?$3", "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php?token=$1" ) – JonKratz Jul 8 '11 at 14:33
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