As I noted back in September 2017, I switched from Rackspace to Amazon Lightsail for my personal website as well as for a learning management system I run for Harbor-UCLA Pediatrics.
I’m using apache virtual hosts run both in separate subdirectories. One problem I had, but didn’t have time to fix (and then forgot about), was that turning on pretty permalinks in WordPress broke the learning management system. I knew two things: 1) it was probably a .htaccess issue and 2) my VirtualHost config was probably making a mess of things.
So why now? I have this lovely short domain (fu.fyi) doing nothing, I thought I’d use it as a custom URL shortener through bit.ly. I can set a default 404 for bad links in bit.ly so I thought I’d just use the themed WP one. But then I realized that the 404 being shown was the default apache 404 page. Which meant that I had to figure out why missing pages were not being passed to the WP stack. Which meant fixing .htaccess and httpd.conf.
Sources:
This is the .htaccess code in WordPress. Can someone explain how it works?
A really lovely online .htaccess checker: https://htaccess.madewithlove.be/
The WP default .htaccess is pretty straightforward.
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
There’s a few sites out there that document that you need to modify the second RewriteRule if your WP installation is in a subdirectory.
RewriteRule . subdir/index.php [L]What they don’t tell you is that you break things when you duplicate RewriteRules in both VirtualHost configs and .htaccess. So cleaning httpd.conf up:
# lms hosting
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName lms.domain2.com
# redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =learn.harborpeds.org
RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerName lms.domain2.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/lms"
<Directory "/var/www/html/lms">
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
Require all granted
</Directory>
Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain1.com/fullchain.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain1.com/privkey.pem
</VirtualHost>
And adding a catch-all to .htaccess before the WP default:
# Turn on rewrites
RewriteEngine On
# Set the base path for rewrites
RewriteBase /
# Redirect anything that slips through httpd.conf to wordpress
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}/subdir/index.php [L]
And the best thing? I actually understand .htaccess better now.
Oh yeah. And it works.
