Rewrite Rule exclude certain strings from (.*) in Regex

Question

I currently have the following htaccess rewrite rule:

RewriteRule    (.*) index.php/$1 [L]

How do I make it exclude 2 certain strings like : 'template' and 'image'?

I read other posts but it was not clear to me.

Answer 1

You could make a negating rewrite condition

Like this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(template|image)
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L]

Which effectively doesn't rewrite any urls pointing to things in the image and template folder.

• Documentation on RewriteCond
• Very good tutorial about htaccess and also goes deeply into url rewriting, worth the read