As I built Tsugi, I want to ship with a decent, working .htaccess in folders that need it. My most typical use case is that I want to map all the URLs in a folder into a file like index.php.

There are two good ways to do this. The old standby is a long set of mod_rewrite rules. The new, much more elegant trick is to use FallbackResource in mod_dir in later versions of Apache 2.2.

The problem is that clever hosting providers upgrade to the new Apache and then figure they can remove mod_rewrite so you know how to do it in either case but don’t have a good way to trigger when to use what approach.

This is my approach that I use in Tsugi when I want to map all URLs to one file:

    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl]
        RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
        RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl:s]
        RewriteRule "(^|/)\." - [F]
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
        RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
    </IfModule>
    
    <IfModule !mod_rewrite.c>
        FallbackResource index.php
    </IfModule>

It is not perfect but kind of deals with things as the move forward. If mod_rewrite is there – use it – it works in later Apache versions as well but if mod_rewrite is there, use it and if not, hope that FallbackResource is there.

Now of course there are some Apache versions / setups where this fails – but on average, over time as Apache’s get upgraded, things get simpler and over time the mod_rewrite code just will stop activating.

I also added this information to a Stack Overflow question.