Getting clean URLs in CodeIgniter to work on Dreamhost

Steve — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:05:55 +0000

Dreamhost, dammit. They seem to get a lot of criticism, but for my testing, fiddling purposes it’s more or less perfect – their shared hosting is cheap and they offer SSH access, and the ability to run Ruby apps alongside the usual PHP action.

But getting CodeIgniter to do clean URLs was a faff. Out of the box with CodeIgniter you get this….

http://madeofstring.co.uk/index.php/squirrels

…when instead you want this:

http://madeofstring.co.uk/squirrels

The trick is down to some .htaccess faffing. (Sysadmins will balk at this, because the right place to fix this is in httpd.conf, but with Dreamhost we don’t have that level of access). Your .htaccess file should look something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /squirrels

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /squirrels/index.php?/$1 [L]

Note the ? after the index.php.

I also add this at the top to enable compression of the content being transmitted:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/javascript text/javascript application/x-javascript

In my config.php file I also had to change my uri_protocol parameter, like this:

$config['uri_protocol'] = "REQUEST_URI";

…and then we’re done – clean URLs in CodeIgniter on Dreamhost.

Trouble with MAMP – “You don’t have permission to access /MAMP/ on this server.”

Steve — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:40:49 +0000

Don’t tell me, you’ve just installed Wordpress on your local MAMP setup and it’s all gone wrong – you can no longer get to phpmyadmin and the MAMP setup page generally.

Check the root of your Mac hard disk – there should be a .htaccess file lurking there, with contents that include…

Options All -Indexes

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
... (and so on...)

Delete this file, or rename it if you’re not happy about doing that. Go to your MAMP start page and everything should be OK again. Time for a celebratory cup of tea.

Update 16th Feb: Ben Frain notes that you might not see the .htaccess in your root folder because it’s a hidden file – his blog post details the Terminal command you need to show all files.

Made of String » htaccess

Getting clean URLs in CodeIgniter to work on Dreamhost

Trouble with MAMP – “You don’t have permission to access /MAMP/ on this server.”