.htaccess and symbolic links?

Posted on December 25, 2015

So I am currently using a particular app on apache that is hosted on its own subdomain. In the root directory of this app there is an .htaccess file with the following code

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1/ [L,R=302]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

I want to create a symbolic link in the directory to link to a completely different app so requests to subdomain.domain.tld/symboliclink/ would use the symbolic link created in the root directory of the subdomain app. The only problem is the .htaccess file above redirects all requests back to itself. How can I set up the subdirectory symbolic link to ignore this .htaccess file so requests to the symbolic link from the web will correctly route traffic while keeping the .htaccess file above unmodified?

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Jon Schwenn

February 15, 2016

Hey there,

You could add this rule above your other rules:

RewriteRule ^(symboliclink)($|/) - [L]

You could also add an .htaccess in the symboliclink location with the following line of code:

RewriteEngine Off

As an example, Apache will go up the folder tree until it finds an applicable .htaccess file. The rules at /var/www/html/folder/.htaccess will override the rules /var/www/html/.htaccess on pages within example.com/folder.

Happy coding,

Jon Schwenn Platform Support Specialist DigitalOcean