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I have a SPA app with dynamic content for sharing on Facebook so I am redirecting Facebook crawlers to a nice static page using the following rule in htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^facebookexternalhit.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://sharing.mysite.tld/api/share/$1 [L]

This works great! But there is one problem... I can't make my app live because Facebook requires a link to privacy policy, terms and conditions etc - and these get redirected too!!

I need to ignore a certain URLs - anything requested in /docs/ - from the above rule EDIT: so that urls containing /docs/ are followed as normal (no redirect, just served normally). I can't get .htaccess to pick up on the ignore rule. I would have thought this would do it (with thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/a/1848579/4881971):

    RewriteRule ^(docs)($|/) - [L]

so I would have thought my .htaccess file would look like this :

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^facebookexternalhit.*$
RewriteRule ^(docs)($|/) - [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://sharing.mysite.tld/api/share/$1 [L]

but when I use Facebook Object Debugger on https://mysite.tld/docs/privacy I get a 404! It redirecting to https://sharing.mysite.tld/api/share/docs/privacy

How do I retain the rule but ignore requests from mysite.tld/docs/* ? Thanks.

Leon
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2 Answers2

4

Could you please try following, please make sure you clear your browser cache before testing your URLs. This considers your uri starts from docs.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine ON
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^facebookexternalhit.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/docs [NC]
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://sharing.mysite.tld/api/share/$1 [L]

In case you want to pass URLs where docs could come anywhere in uri(not from starting what 1st solution looks for), then try following Rules.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine ON
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^facebookexternalhit.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} docs [NC]
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://sharing.mysite.tld/api/share/$1 [L]
RavinderSingh13
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1

Have it like this with a negated comdition:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^facebookexternalhit [NC]
RewriteRule %{THE_REQUEST} !\s/+docs [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://sharing.mysite.tld/api/share%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301,NE]
anubhava
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