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Apache Re-Writes in .htaccess

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

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In this post I will walk you through an example scenario that will use an apache re-write to clean up the URL to make it more SEO friendly and human readable, which as I briefly touched upon in my last post, is very important for the search engine optimization of your website.

Scenario

Members Site – Profiles

Lets say our members site has 4 members, each of which has their own profile page, containing information stored in a database. To access this page we want to be able to use the URL:

www.example.com/profile/[username]

The Set Up

Database

If we set up a table in our database and create the following table: -

database

--
-- Table structure for table `users`
--
 
CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `id` int(3) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `username` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `age` int(3) NOT NULL,
  `tel` varchar(13) NOT NULL,
  `location` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  UNIQUE KEY `username` (`username`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;
 
--
-- Dumping data for table `users`
--
 
INSERT INTO `users` VALUES(1, 'stew', 22, '0154684874', 'Doncaster');
INSERT INTO `users` VALUES(2, 'Oli', 24, '01132648745', 'Leeds');
INSERT INTO `users` VALUES(3, 'Craig', 24, '0208548765', 'London');
INSERT INTO `users` VALUES(4, 'James', 21, '01777648465', 'Retford');

And create a very simple profile page:

Profile.php

	<?php
 
	//Set up our database connection	
	mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', 'root');	
	mysql_select_db('example');
 
	//Get the username variable from the URL and asign it to the variable user	
	$user = $_GET['username'];	
	$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$user'";	
	$result = mysql_query($query);
 
       //while there are values within the results array, make them equal to $x
	while($x = mysql_fetch_array($result)){		
		echo "<h1>". $x['username']."</h1><br>";
		echo "<b>Age:</b> ". $x['age']."<br>";
		echo "<b>Telephone:</b> ".$x['tel']."<br>";
		echo "<b>Location:</b> ".$x['location']."<br>";	
	}	
       //close the mysql connection
	mysql_close();
 
	?>

If you visit the page profile.php you will see that nothing appears, because we have not fed a username into the url. If you add the following to the end ‘?username=’Stew’, providing there is an entry in the database for a Stew, a profile along with some basic information will appear on the screen.

screen print

But this URL is not human readable, user friendly or SEO friendly, so we now have to trick our web server into thinking they are seeing this URL. We can do this using a simple .htaccess file located in the root folder of the website. The file will tell the server that when it see’s the clean URL, what it is actually seeing is in fact the dirty, ugly URL, leaving both parties happy.

Ensuring mod_rewrite is enabled

We just have to make a quick check to ensure that your apache server is set-up to handle the re-writes before we start.

In a new file called info.php simply type:

        <?php phpinfo(); ?>

and point your web browser to that page, scrolling down to the ‘loaded moudles’ section, look for ‘mod_rewrite’. If you can’t find it then this site should help you to enable it.

.htaccess

With mod_rewrite enabled we can now write our .htaccess file. Create a new file in your root folder, and called ‘.htaccess’, within the file add the following

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RewriteEngine on
 
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/\.]+)/?$ profile.php?username=$1 [L]

RewriteRule breakdown

^profile – checks if this rule applies (“does the url start with this”)
([^/\]+) – the brackets tell the rule to remember the matching data. The rules [^/\]+ means anything except forward and back slash is acceptable
/?$ – Ensures there is nothing except a forward slash after the information else the rule is skipped
profile.php?username=$1 – Tells appache which page to actually load, with $1 being replaced with the captured variable
[L] – Makes sure no other rules are used if this one is successful

Testing

With the htaccess file saved, we must first restart appache, then if we visit:

…/profile/James