Rewrite Condition to compare top level directory from Request_URI

Question

I have several clients on my website with largely similar sites setup for each client. The folders for these client accounts are set up for organizational purposes at:

Answer 1

RewriteCond can have a part of the match as its first argument, so you can use

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/client/$1 -d
RewriteRule ^(.+?)/(.*)$ /client/$1/$2 [L,QSA]

Apache will check if %{REQUEST_URI} starts (^) with a directory name of nonzero length followed by a slash, then it will use the first match to see if a directory of that name exists witih %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/client/. If so, the rewrite rule will apply whatever follows the slash (even nothing).

E.g. if the user requests the page

mydomain.com/sampleclient/orders

Apache will check if %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/client/sampleclient exists and is a directory, and if so, it will load

mydomain.com/client/sampleclient/orders

Generally, it will load mydomain.com/client/sampleclient/[whatever comes after the first slash].

If you don't need it to load mydomain.com/client/sampleclient/orders and want to apply the rewrite rules inside the sampleclient directory, use

RewriteRule ^(.+?)/(.*)$ /client/$1/ [QSA]

That is, remove the $2 from the replace string, and the L flag inside square brackets.

See also these Apache docs for more info.