CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexapache.htaccessmod-rewrite
chris85
chris85

Reputation: 23892

Mod Rewrite L Flag Not stopping

Why does:

http://example.com/robots.txt

redirect to:

http://www.example.com/mvc/view/robots/live-robots.txt

with these rules:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?example\.com
RewriteRule ^robots.txt /mvc/view/robots/live-robots.txt [L]
#.... 20 irrelevant lines for mobile rewrites
# Force the "www."
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

loading this however:

http://www.example.com/robots.txt

rewrites the live-robots.txt as expected.

Shouldn't the L flag stop the redirect in both cases and not get to the latter rule?

The L flag can be useful in this context to end the current round of mod_rewrite processing.

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/flags.html

Current execution paths:

  1. http://example.com/robots.txt
  2. 301 served
  3. http://www.example.com/mvc/view/robots/live-robots.txt

and then

  1. http://www.example.com/robots.txt
  2. 200 (contents of mvc/view/robots/live-robots.txt are served)

I'm pretty sure it isn't a regex issue but here's testing of that too, https://regex101.com/r/eI9aC4/1.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 618

Answers (1)

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785246

Flag L doesn't stop other rules to execute. It just acts as continue in a while loop and makes mod_rewrite loop to run again.

Your rules need to be reversed in order. In general keep redirect rules before internal rewrite ones:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Force the "www."
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NE]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^robots\.txt$ mvc/view/robots/live-robots.txt [L,NC]
#.... 20 irrelevant lines for mobile rewrites

Make sure to clear your browser cache for this change.

However if you have Apache 2.4+ then you can use END flag to completely stop all the rules below:

RewriteRule ^robots\.txt$ mvc/view/robots/live-robots.txt [END]

Upvotes: 1

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