I have a copy of Concrete5, a PHP-based CMS, running on example.com.
Concrete5 comes with the following basic instructions for pretty URLs (redirecting all URLs to a central index.php)
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/c5.7
RewriteRule ^.*$ c5.7/$0 [L] # Concrete5 is running in the c5.7/ subdirectory
</IfModule>
Pretty straightforward.
Now I have a certain set of URLs that take the form
/product/{productname}
that I need to forward to the Concrete5 (virtual) URL
/products/details?name={productname}
That URL is set up and works as expected when I enter it manually in the browser.
So I added a line to the htaccess file and it now looks like this:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# New rule for products
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/product/
RewriteRule ^product/(.+)$ /products/details?name=$1 [QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/c5.7
RewriteRule ^.*$ c5.7/$0 [L]
</IfModule>
I can confirm the RewriteRule gets triggered when I choose a random, external URL as the redirection target.
But whenever it is an internal redirect like above, what happens is, I get a 404 inside Concrete5. When I inspect what was passed to it, I see:
REQUEST_URI: /product/my-random-product
QUERY_STRING: name=my-random-product
So it appears that the rule is triggered and does some rewriting, but REQUEST_URI remains unchanged!
Why?
Is it because PHP 7.1 is running via CGI?
I have tried a zillion variations and all the flags in the book, with little success.