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Setting up SEO-friendly URLs in htaccess/PHP

This is something I feel like I've done dozens of times over the years, and always have to waste some time googling before I figure it out. Maybe next time I'll remember to look here?

So, you're writing a custom site, and you need to be able to handle SEO-friendly URLs. You know, the kind where instead of something like "category=my_category&page=233" you the URLs to look more like "/my_category/my_page"

Those are called SEO Friendly URLs and really they're also just plain friendlier for people too. They're really kind of a leftover from when a lot static HTML sites were really organized with subdirectories full of HTML files - and Apache will still work like that "out of the box"

My usual approach to this has two parts. First, there's a custom .htaccess file in the main site directory, that redirects all requests (that are not for actual files/directories) to index.php

Then, in the index.php there's a bit of code to figure out how to route stuff based on the URL requested.

The .htaccess
A .htaccess file is a little file you can put in a directly (under Apache) that tells Apache to do various special things with requests that involve that directory. In this case, we're going to rewrite the requests so a request for "/foo/bar" ends up getting process by index.php (while still looking  like "foo/bar" in the browser). Here's the .htaccess, we'll discuss it.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L,QSA]

The first part just tells Apache to make sure Rewrite processing is "on" and working. Then there are three conditions set before rewriting can occur. These are (in order) - that the request is not for an existing file, that it's not for an existing directory and finally that it's not a request for the 'favicon.ico' file. That last one may not be strictly necessary, I took this from an existing site's .htaccess file :)

Then is the actual rewrite rule. It rewrites every to the index.php file in the directory. The two flags at the end tell Apache that this is the Last rule, and to also pass all query arguments (QSA)

The PHP
Now, you're going to have these requests passed into your index.php file, and you'll need to do stuff with them. This can work however you want/need - for me I keep it simple. This code takes the query string, splits it into an array of segments called $URL

$URL = explode('/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
array_shift($URL);

The array_shift call just removes the first empty element that will always be there.

With this $URL variable it's easy now to just grab the segment needed and use it as necessary. "/foo/bar" requests will end up with a $URL variable where $URL[0] = "foo" and  $URL[1] = "bar". Easy!



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