Name

RewriteRule

Synopsis

RewriteRule Pattern Substitution [flags]
Server config, virtual host, directory

This directive can be used as many times as necessary. Each occurrence applies the rule to the output of the preceding one, so the order matters. Pattern is matched to the incoming URL; if it succeeds, the Substitution is made. An optional argument, flags, can be given. The flags, which follow, can be abbreviated to one or two letters:

redirect|R

Force redirect.

proxy|P

Force proxy.

last|L

Last rule — go to top of rule with current URL.

chain|C

Apply following chained rule if this rule matches.

type|T= mime-type

Force target file to be mime-type.

nosubreq|NS

Skip rule if it is an internal subrequest.

env|E=VAR:VAL

Set an environment variable.

qsappend|QSA

Append a query string.

passthrough|PT

Pass through to next handler.

skip|S= num

Skip the next num rules.

next|N

Next round — start at the top of the rules again.

gone|G

Returns HTTP response 410 — “URL Gone.”

forbidden|F

Returns HTTP response 403 — “URL Forbidden.”

nocase|NC

Makes the comparison case insensitive.

For example, say we want to rewrite URLs of the form:

/Language/~Realname/.../File

into:

/u/Username/.../File.Language

We take the rewrite map file and save it under /anywhere/map.real-to-user. Then we only have to add the following lines to the Apache server Config file:

RewriteLog   /anywhere/rewrite.log 
RewriteMap   real-to-user  txt:/anywhere/map.real-to-host 
RewriteRule  ^/([^/]+)/~([^/]+)/(.*)$   /u/${real-to-user:$2|nobody}/$3.$1