Redirect everything not found in a directory to another director

Question

I have directories called v1 and v2. So the user can go to http://example.com/v1 or http://example.com/v2.

v2 has a copy of index.html from v1, and some css files that were never in v1.

v1 has an images directory with hundreds of images in.

If the user goes to v2/images they rightfully get a 404. How do I redirect anything that is not found in the v2 directory to the v1 directory?

Eg:

http://example.com/v2/someotherfile.html -> http://example.com/v1/someotherfile.html 
http://example.com/v2/images/base.jpg -> http://example.com/v1/images/base.jpg 
http://example.com/v2/index.html //does not redirect

(and if it doesn't exist in v1 or v2 it should go to the ErrorDocument for 404 defined in .htaccess?)

Also by user I mean anything, ajax the src of img and script tags, etc.

Answer 1

Just use RewriteCond. It's described in detail in the apache manual.

<Directory /v2>
   RewriteEngine On
   # if there isnt such a file or directory
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /v1/$1
</Directory>

This rewrites (internally) the requests. If you want to redirect the user (HTTP 301), use the [R] flag. You may have issues with RewriteBase in a per directory configuration, just see the manual.