apache rewrite issues

[dmolavi]

i'm migrating part of my PHPNuke site from one of my servers to a new server, with a different domain name. the database is being transferred, thus the story/article/forum IDs are remaining the same. how would i craft a rewrite rule that would redirect people to the new server only for a certain subset of the articles? there is an "sid" field in the URL that would have to be checked; if it matches any one of the articles which has been moved, the URL should be rewritten.

thanks in advance, dm

[fcgreg]

It somewhat depends on if you want to redirect someone to the new site as opposed to actually rewriting the URL and processing on the same server. Since you mentioned the content was moved to a new server, I'll give you an example with mod_alias (which does redirection).

mod_alias contains a statement named "RedirectMatch" that comes in handy for such cases, and mod_redirect has less overhead than mod_rewrite. You can use a regular expression to match on the URL (actually, the PATH in the URL), then forward to a new URL accordingly. It looks like this:

[dmolavi]

[dmolavi]

here is the code i put in the <IfModule mod_alias.c> section of commonapache.conf:

[fcgreg]

To my knowledge, the mod_alias module only matches against the PATH portion of the URL -- this means the hostname doesn't count for the match expression and neither does the QUERY_STRING (everything after the question mark). Now, if you include the RedirectMatch directive inside your Apache configuration files (as opposed to an .htaccess file), it should seamlessly pass your QUERY_STRING through to the new URL. However, since in this case you want to actually match against items in the QUERY_STRING, you will need the mod_rewrite module.

Now, regarding how you put code into the "<IfModule mod_..." common block:

Do you mean in your main section of your Apache config? If so, this is undesireable -- at least for what you're trying to do. You would be much better off putting redirect clauses inside of your VirtualHost containers, since that is where they most specifically apply (although technically you can put most of these directives anywhere in the configuration if you want/need to).

Based on the above, the following directive should work in your case:

(inside the VirtualHost container for yankeesinthesouth.org)

[dmolavi]

perfect thanks.