How do you redirect to CGI only on a query?

Question

I'm replacing index.cgi of gitweb with a static index.html page.

However I don't want links to gitweb repositories to break, such as http://example.com/?p=foobar;

My non-working .htaccess currently looks like:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} p
RewriteRule ^/ /index.cgi

What am I missing?

Answer 1

By my reading of the RewriteRule docs ("What is matched?" box), if your RewriteRule is in a Directory section or .htaccess file, then the leading / will be stripped away, so the pattern in your rule won't match. You could try replacing the pattern by just ^, i.e.

RewriteRule ^ /index.cgi

Answer 2

With that rule you will never be able to access the index.html page as the redirect will match anything.

You would need to do something along the lines of

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING}      ^$
RewriteRule ^/                   /index.html [L]
RewriteRule ^/                   /index.cgi

Which should work out similar to 'if you don't have a querystring go to index.html, otherwise go to index.cgi and pass the rest of the string along too!'

Answer 3

It will match any URI that is not index.cgi or index.html beginning with a p query string and rewrite it to your cgi.

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^p
RewriteRule !(index.cgi|index.html) /index.cgi [L]

The L option means that Apache stops processing rewrite rules.