How to automatically make pretty urls

Question

I have a site that I'm working on, but I'm annoyed that I have to work with ugly URLS. So, I have a URL of http://example.com/user.php?id=54 and another of http://example.com/foobar.php?name=Test.

How could I convert both of them to pretty URLS without adding it to .htaccess for every URL I want to make pretty?

example.com/user.php?id=54 => example.com/user/54

example.com/foobar.php?name=Test => example.com/foobar/Test

I have this in my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$1\.php -f
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ $1.php [L]
RewriteRule ^$1/$3/? /$1.php?$2=$3 [NC]

Thanks, Lucy

My full .htaccess file:

# include classes on every page
php_value auto_prepend_file Resources/Classes.php

# add custom Directory Indexes
DirectoryIndex index.php Default.php Down.php

# begin routing to pretty URLs
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/(?!Resources)([0-9a-zA-Z-]+)/([0-9]+) /$1.php?id=$2 [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(?!Resources)([0-9a-zA-Z-]+)/([a-zA-Z-]+) /$1.php?name=$2 [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*?)/?$ $1.php [L]

Answer 1

Try this

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^user/([0-9]+) /user.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^foobar/([0-9a-zA-Z-]+) /foobar.php?name=$1 [QSA,L]

if you want global rule you can make

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([0-9a-zA-Z-]+)/([0-9a-zA-Z-]+) /$1.php?parameter=$2 [NC]

or more specifically

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([0-9a-zA-Z-]+)/([0-9]+) /$1.php?id=$2 [NC]
RewriteRule ^([0-9a-zA-Z-]+)/([a-zA-Z-]+) /$1.php?name=$2 [NC]

when argument will be a string it will pas name parameter and when argument will be integer there will be id parameter passed.

Answer 2

I may delete this answer in the future as it might be specific to my setup.

---

I recently discovered, using Apache, that anything after the URL was populating the PATH_INFO environment variable. This means that given your example, example.com/user/54, if user was a script the server could process, anything after it would be populated into PATH_INFO; in this case it would look like /54. This is a great find because with proper structure, you could make your own router similar to Rails.

I would create some landing page (e.g., index) which is going to be your application router: example.com/index/<model>/<id>/. Inside index would be your routing code. I'll use Perl to demonstrate, since it's better than PHP :) Note that index could be called anything that Apache can process (e.g., router.php, index.pl, application.rb); though, removing the extension adds to the beauty of the URL.

index:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use 5.012;

# Retrieve what you're looking for; obviously not production-ready
my ($model,$id) = $ENV{PATH_INFO} =~ m{^/([^/]+?)/([^/]+)};

# route the request
given($model){
   when('user'){ callUser($id); }     # callUser defined elsewhere, perhaps another script
   when('foobar'){ callFoobar($id); } # callFoobar defined elsewher, perhaps another script
   default { makePageDefault(); }
}

• http://example.com/index/user/1: passes 1 to callUser()
• http://example.com/index/foobar/5: passes 5 to callFoodbar()
• http://example.com/index/user: calls makePageDefault() because regex was not smart enough to handle anything without an ID
• http://example.com/index/diffmodel/1: also calls makePageDefault(), since we don't handle diffmodel didn't exist

---

The script above is not production ready because it doesn't perform any sanitation and doesn't handle all the use cases you will need. My guess is you want something similar to Rails (e.g., example.com/movie/1/edit). While Apache is designed to handle the routing for you, there is some convenience in being able to manage this close to where your application code lives.

I have not implemented this method, so I'm curious to hear if this is something used and if there's any reason not to trust it.