Disable .htaccess within .htaccess in a sub direcory

Question

I have a /public folder in which there is an .htaccess file with a lot of rewrite rules.

We are making a new folder at /public/news, the rules of the first .htaccess file apply in this folder too and that's undesirable.

I don't have access to server's virtual host definition so my only other option is to put exceptions in every rewrite rule in the /public/.htaccess which is not preferable.

I was wondering if I could put a new .htaccess file in /public/news so that it will disable all the effects of the first .htaccess

Answer 1

The suggested answer above works, but I was hoping to find a way so that I don't have to modify /public/.htaccess

The solution was to put

 RewriteEngine off

In /public/news/.htaccess

Answer 2

Add this to your /public/.htaccess at the top (before other rules, after RewriteEngine On):

RewriteRule ^news(.*)$ - [L]

It will not rewrite anywhere because of the -, and the [L] will cause the current .htaccess to stop processing more rules (the last flag). Then the /public/news/.htaccess can take effect.

Apache Mod_Rewrite Documentation