How to do URL re-writing in PHP?

Question

I am trying to implement URL rewriting in my PHP application. Can someone share a step by step procedure of implementing URL rewriting in PHP and MySQL?

In my applic

Answer 1

You cannot do this with PHP alone. You'll need to look into mod_rewrite (assuming you are using apache).

Answer 2

Using mod rewrite:

RewriteRule ^videos/play/([0-9]+)/([^.]+)$ play.php?id=$1&name=$2

example.com/play.php?id=203&name=google-io-2009-wave-intro

would work as

example.com/videos/play/203/google-io-2009-wave-intro

Answer 3

Keep in mind that redirecting is not the same as rewriting.

A redirect is when the server receives the request and the response is sent as a redirect. For instance, you request a page www.example.com/page. When the server receives this, either the page or the server self issues a redirect command to the browser. The redirect command basically says "go here: new page". In PHP, this is in the form of header('Location: newpage.html');

A rewrite is when the server receives the request from the browser then looks in a list of matching regular expressions for that site. If a match is found, the URL is rewritten into that form and is responded to accordingly. For instance, the requested URL www.example.com/specificpage could be rewritten (on the server end) as www.example.com/?loadpage=specificpage. The browser never receives header information stating that it must go somewhere else.

Answer 4

A Beginner's Guide to mod_rewrite.

Typically this will be nothing more than enabling the mod_rewrite module (you likely already have it enabled with your host), and then adding a .htaccess file into your web-directory. Once you've done that, you are only a few lines away from being done. The tutorial linked above will take care of you.

Just for fun, here's a Kohana .htaccess file for rewriting:

# Turn on URL rewriting
RewriteEngine On

# Installation directory
RewriteBase /rootDir/

# Protect application and system files from being viewed
RewriteRule ^(application|modules|system) - [F,L]

# Allow any files or directories that exist to be displayed directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

# Rewrite all other URLs to index.php/
RewriteRule .* index.php/$0 [PT,L]

What this will do is take all requests and channel them through the index.php file. So if you visited www.examplesite.com/subjects/php, you may actually be visiting www.examplesite.com/index.php?a=subjects&b=php.

If you find these URLs attractive, I would encourage you to go one step further and check out the MVC Framework (Model, View, Controller). It essentially allows you to treat your website like a group of functions:

www.mysite.com/jokes

public function jokes ($page = 1) {
  # Show Joke Page (Defaults to page 1)
}

Or, www.mysite.com/jokes/2

public function jokes ($page = 1) {
  # Show Page 2 of Jokes (Page 2 because of our different URL)
}

Notice how the first forward slash calls a function, and all that follow fill up the parameters of that function. It's really very nice, and make web-development much more fun!

Answer 5

Sorry about not giving you detailed explanation, but maybe you could take a look at DokuWiki for a starting point.

In its setup it accepts 3 modes:

1. Regular urls: ?id=zzz
2. .htaccess rewrite: uses apache to do the rewritting
3. internal (php) rewrite: urls end up looking like http://www.example.com/kb/doku.php/start

It's free so you can just download and browse the code.

As a note, the apache redirect is very likely the best solution but the pure php one is also interesting in case your code is going to run in IIS6 servers where rewritting is not as easy as in apache.

Answer 6

After reading comments and question once again, I've realized that my previous answer is not completely the thing your are looking for. So here some additions, if you want rewrite/redirect/proxy the URL addresses so for example then user types www.f1.com he will actually see www.f2.com, but domain will remain the same, you probably need to setup a reverse proxy using Apache for that. It act's similar to mod_rewrite.

Regarding the second part, since modern crawler also performing the URL link analyses I think your first option is better performance wise.

Previous answer:
And using PHP you can achieve redirection like:

<?php
// Here you can parse the current location
// and decide whenever you want to go
// if $_SERVER[ 'PHP_SELF'] some conditions then....
header('Location: http://www.example.com/');
?>

From php.net. Here more examples.