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I'm developing a highly dynamic website that needs to handle a lot of URI that do not actually have a file behind them. So I used .htaccess to redirect all non-existing URI to a php file that displays what I need based on the URI by looking into various tables in a database and including the correct web-pages.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ /urihandling.php [L,NC,QSA]

This will produce a 200 OK Status and keeps the URI in the address-bar so it's exactly what I want.

Now my problem is, if the user accesses a URL that is not in the database, I want to redirect to a custom 404 page (e.g. 404.html) and produce the status code 404 Not found.

First I tried:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ /urihandling.php [L,NC,QSA]
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
ErrorDocument 403 /403.html

That does not load 404.html when I use 

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");

in my urihandling.php file. In fact, it doesn't load anything, it just shows a blank page (if I erase the Rewrite commands, the 404 works fine, so the syntax etc. seems to be ok). I thought maybe the problem is that the 404 triggers the rewrite and then it's going into some sort of redirect-loop or something.

Then I tried this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule /404.* /404.html [R=404,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ /urihandling.php [L,NC,QSA]
ErrorDocument 404 /403.html
ErrorDocument 403 /403.html

With or without the ErrorDocument makes no difference. Then in my urihandling.php I used

header('Location: http://somesite.com/404.html');

This works as far as the user is concerned, but looking at the status codes in the HTTP headers, I get a HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

So my question is, how can I achive this and still get a 404 status code?

Thanks for the help!

Simeon
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2 Answers2

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As your script handling request, it should generate 404 header itself, so it'll be like that:

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");

and output your 404.html after that without redirection

S Korolev
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See: How can I create an error 404 in PHP?

Which means this is more likely then not, a duplicate. But alas, as an answer:

 header($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"]." 404 Not Found");
 include("http://somesite.com/404.html");

should be the solution you're looking for.

Community
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That guy
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