[SOLVED] RewriteRule in Elastic Beanstalk not working

Issue

I've created a server.config file within an .ebextensions/ folder with the following content, and deployed it to my Apache/PHP Elastic Beanstalk instance, but it doesn't seem to want to prettify my URLs...

files:
"/etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl_rewrite.conf":
    mode: "000644"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
        RewriteEngine On

        RewriteRule    ^(.*)index\.php$ /$1                 [R=301,NC]
        RewriteRule    ^terms$          /tac.php            [NC,L]
        RewriteRule    ^info$           /information.php    [NC,L]
        RewriteRule    ^visit$          /visit.php          [NC,L]

It seems simple enough, but for example mysite.com/terms results in a 404 (whereas mysite.com/tac.php works fine).

Have I done something silly that I'm just not seeing (seems likely), or do I need to enable something in my EB instance's config?

Solution

It was a silly gotcha. These rules (as written) need to be in .htaccess not a *.conf file.

You can learn more about the differences here: http://tltech.com/info/rewriterule-in-htaccess-vs-httpd-conf/

Apache matches different things depending on whether the RewriteRule or RewriteCond directive is placed inside a <Directory> block. And significantly, everything in an .htaccess file is assumed to be in Directory context.

So rules in a .htaccess file behave the same way as rules in a block, which is different from the way rules behave outside a block. Armed with this knowledge, we can fix our httpd.conf file just by moving the rules into the <Directory> block

Answered By - Chuck Le Butt

Answer Checked By - Marie Seifert (WPSolving Admin)