The Underscore Archives

On 03/01/2008, Sam Machin <sam at bs8.org.uk> wrote:
> Hi _
>
> I'm trying to build a site/service and I want to be able to have
> usernames ulrs, e.g. http://foo.com/sam
>
> I've worked out how to pass parameters as slashes in the URL eg
> foo.com/user/sam where user is a php script but I'd like to do it on
> the top level.
>
> Currently I've defined a custom 404 page in .htaccess and I'm using
> the $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'] variable to get the username.

Presumably you used ErrorDocument to specify the custom 404 handler.
That won't work with POST requests (or any requests with an entity).

> However I'm rather aware that hacking the 404 isn't really an ideal
> solution, anybody know how to do it properly?

It's possible to have /user.php called for /user/bob automatically by
setting Options MultiViews, but you want to drop the /user/ part as
well.

> FYI I'm running apache1.3 on a MacOSX box and I've got root access.

I'd highly recommend building 2.2 instead, but that shouldn't be an
issue for this task.

So, with mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !whatever.php
RewriteRule ([^/]+) /whatever.php

That'll stop requests like /images/foo.png from being rewritten, but
of course any requests like /foo will be. That's not ideal, but that's
what you asked for :-)

I'm always on #apache on the freenode irc network, just ping noodl.

-- 
noodl