RewriteRule in .htaccess not working

Question

I am currently running Apache2 on my local machine, installed with the latest version of Ubuntu.

I am trying to get basic URL rewriting working by using the .htaccess file.

The file "http://localhost/page.php?=home" does exist, and the location "/doesnotexist/home" does not.

I would like to have the first page be loaded when the second is requested.

My .htaccess file looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/doesnotexist/(.*)$ /page.php?p=$1 

My httpd.conf file looks like this:

LoadModule rewrite_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_rewrite.so

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

Note that my httpd.conf file looks exactly like that, as it was empty before I edited it.

The result that I get is this:

Not Found

The requested URL /doesnotexist/home was not found on this server.

I have googled the ever living **** out of this problem, and I have never gotten anything other than the error above.

If anyone has any ideas, I would be very appreciative.

Answer 1

For the benefit of others, I figured out the answer:

In the file "/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default" there was the line:

AllowOverride None

Change this to:

AllowOverride All

Answer 2

You need to remove the contextual path prefix from your pattern when using mod_rewrite in a .htaccess file. In the case of the root directory, the path prefix is just /. So try this:

RewriteRule ^doesnotexist/(.*)$ /page.php?p=$1