RewriteRule creating 500 Internal Server Error

Question

I have the following in my .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^directory/(.*)$ directory/index.php?id=$1

What I'm trying to achieve is this:

When the URL www.mydomain.com/directory/10 is visited, the page www.mydomain.com/directory/?id=10 is displayed on the browser without altering the appearance of the URL.

The above code creates a 500 Internal server error though.

Does anyone know where I'm going wrong?

Answer 1

Your code is guaranteed to generate 500 internal server error because it is causing infinite looping. Reason is that your matching URI pattern is: ^directory/(.*)$

Which matches your URLs before and after rewrites. And once it reaches max allowed internal rewrite limit Apache throws 500 internal server error and bails out.

Change your code to this:

Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
# Turn mod_rewrite on
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^directory/(.*)$ /directory/index.php?id=$1 [L,QSA,NC]

Above code has an extra RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f that will make sure to disallow subsequent execution of RewriteRule after first time since /directory/index.php will be a valid file.

Answer 2

I have got the same issue and found that "rewrite" module is not yet enabled in my case. So I need to enable it and then restart apache server:

• Enable "rewrite" module: sudo a2enmod rewrite
• Then restart apache server: sudo service apache2 restart

Hope this will help anyone.