.htaccess not being read

Question

Iam trying to redirect my home page or any other page on the site to a particular php page . This is my htaccess

Redirect 301 http://test.com/info http://test.com/get_forms_data.php
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine ON
RewriteRule ^test.php$ http://test.com/get_forms_data.php [R=301,L]

I have checked my apache server .rewrite is enabled .

It still doesnt work .

Answer 1

I was struggling with the same problem, and Darren Cook's answer gave me the definitive clue to find the solution.

My app was in some folder out of th public www path, lt's say in /opt/my_app. I couldn't create a VirtualHost, so I created a symlink in Apache's public www ponting to my folder:

/var/www/html/my_app -> /opt/my_app

The thing is, in my App's Apache config file, I was specifying:

<Directory /opt/my_app>
  AllowOverride All
</Directory>

And my .htaccess file wasn't being read. Then I saw that in Apache's configuration there was this:

<Directory /var/www/html>
  AllowOverride None
</Directory>

Then I realised that Apache config files do not care about symlinks, and therefore the general rule was being applied to my App's foler. I changed Directory to:

<Directory /var/www/html/my_app>
  AllowOverride All
</Directory>

And everything worked.

Answer 2

If no matter what you put into your .htaccess file, you don't even get an error, that means that you probably need to have

AllowOverride All

set in your site configuration.

If you're on ubuntu, the place to look for the configuration is /etc/apache2/sites-available/. There you should find a file called default if this is a stock install of the default LAMP stack (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP).

The key part there is this:

<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
</Directory>

Now change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All. After that don't forget to restart your apache like so:

$ service apache2 restart