Removing index.php from the url

Problem: removing index.php (the front controller script) from Seagull urls causes modules with web resources to fail to load

  • note: a module with web resources is any module that has a www dir, upon install this is symlinked to the webroot, so your web files like CSS, js and images can be loaded by browser requests

UPDATE

This problem has been fixed with the etc/htaccess-cleanUrl.dist file supplied in Seagull 0.6.6. Please ignore the rest of this page if you're using Seagull 0.6.6 or later.

Solution

Modify your .htaccess file (copied from etc/htaccess-cleanUrl.dist) and replace the line 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

with 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l

This allows mod_rewrite to correctly interpret the symlinks Seagull has created in the www dir. Making this modification however will prevent you from being able to list the contents of a directory in Seagull. Requesting distinct files from within a folder will continue to work fine.

works 

http://example.com/foo/bar.txt
http://example.com/foo/baz.js
http://example.com/foo/quux.css

doesn't work 

http://example.com/foo/

Between loading Seagull modules (with and without web resources) and using routes, you should never have to list the contents of a directory. If you do however please be aware that this will not work.

Windows Users

This hack will not work as the web resources are copied and not symlinked under Windows. To have the same behavior do the following:

  • add a placeholder file called e.g. norewrite.txt in each module's web resources folder
  • modify you .htaccess file:

Change 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

to 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}norewrite\.txt -f

Note 1: In the 0.9 releases of Seagull we will be prefixing the web resources dirs with an underscore, so htaccess mods won't be necessary.

0.6.x 

web resource: modules/foo/www
symlink created: www/foo

0.9.x 

web resource: modules/foo/www
symlink created: www/_foo

see #1610

Note 2: In Seagull 0.6.5 the etc/htaccess-cleanUrl.dist was changed to support symlinks by default, ie -d was replaced with -l