Directory agnostic Apache mod_rewrite rule for web applications

Question

I'm in the process of developing a PHP application but I have limited working knowledge of mod_rewrite which I plan to use to create "pretty URLs".

Whilst the application is in development I'm working on it in my public_html folder. At the moment I have an index.php which provides access to other PHP files like customers.php which takes an ID and looks for that customer's details in a DB and displays them.

The unprettified URL looks like http://server.domain.com/~user/webapp/customers.php?ID=1 which I want to transform to http://server.domain.com/~user/webapp/customers/1.

I've written the following mod_rewrite rule which works to rewrite the webapp/customers.php to webapp/customers/

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /~user/webapp/

rewriterule ^customers$ customers.php [L]

</IfModule>

There is an obvious drawback to this (I'll worry about catering for the ID in the URI later for now). This is placed in a .htaccess and assumes that the application lives in /home/user/webapp/ on the server.

This is clearly limiting and very inflexible, so I want to know is there's a way of creating directory agnostic mod_rewrite rules so that it doesn't matter where the application has been installed? I realise it's probably never going to be perfect as it depends on the server configuration but there must be a better way of doing what I'd like than the above?

Answer 1

For the use cases that you're talking about, having no explicit RewriteBase (and just letting it use current directory context, as is the default) should work just fine.

As for the ID conversion, something along these lines should work:

RewriteRule ^customers/(\d+)$ customers.php?ID=$1 [L]

Answer 2

Try this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule /~user/webapp/customers/([0-9]+)$ /~user/webapp/customers.php?ID=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

This should work!

(PS: I try to avoid RewriteBase because (believe my experience) you may get into trouble if yo have a lot of rules and you edit them many months later (= you don't remember there's a RewriteBase))

Answer 3

After digging around I was able to answer my own question. When the webapp is installed it asks for a web address and a local file path for the app and uses that in the .htaccess as it's RewriteBase.