symfony + mod_rewrite: moving smoothly from development to production environments

2007-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

I think a common problem for some symfony developers that aren't too familiar with Apache's Mod Rewrite is when they move from a development environment that uses an explicit controller (e.g. frontend_dev.php is requested from the server explicitly) to their production app which implicitly calls index.php (e.g. '/' or some other route is passed to index.php) things stop working.

This is probably a mod_rewrite issue. Mod Rewrite handles implicitly directing (almost) all traffic to index.php in a symfony application.

The default .htaccess for symfony is defined as such:

Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On

  # uncomment the following line, if you are having trouble
  # getting no_script_name to work
  #RewriteBase /

  # we skip all files with .something
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \..+$
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.html$
  RewriteRule .* - [L]

  # we check if the .html version is here (caching)
  RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
  RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

  # no, so we redirect to our front web controller
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

# big crash from our front web controller
ErrorDocument 500 "<h2>Application error</h2>symfony application failed to start properly"

As you can see if the mod_rewrite.c module is not enabled this will not work.

Luckily most packages of Apache have the module, it just needs to be enabled by uncommenting the right line of .htaccess:

LoadModule rewrite_module     libexec/httpd/mod_rewrite.so

Restarting apache should give you full rewrite control. This is fairly basic Apache administration, but for a lot of people symfony is their first foray into URL rewriting.

Dave Dash

symfony + mod_rewrite: moving smoothly from development to production environments