Redirect loop on wp-admin or wp-login.php

Question

I put together a quick WordPress site locally using MAMP, then checked it into an SVN repo. I then checked it out on to my development server.

I didn't change anything except to run the search and replace tool script from Interconnectit to updated the URL of the site in the database on the server.

Initially, I got a 500 server error. Checking the logs, I discovered that this "SoftException" was because index.php was writeable by group - the permissions were 664. No problem - a quick change of permissions to 644 sorted that. So now the frontside was working.

However, strangely, the admin side of the site did not work. It just produced an endless redirect loop in all browsers.

Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects.

Nothing has changed since the local development version. The htaccess file is just a standard WordPress one. Nothing weird... still working fine locally.

So what's going on?

Answer 1

For whatever reason /wp-admin/ path causes a redirect loop, but /wp-admin/index.php does not. As such, we can use .htaccess to redirect the /wp-admin/ path to /wp-admin/index.php by adding the following line to your .htaccess file after "RewriteBase /" line like this:

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule  /wp-admin/ /wp-admin/index\.php [L,P]

It worked for me like that. You final .htaccess would probably look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule  /wp-admin/ /wp-admin/index\.php [L,P]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress