Mapping several URLs to one login page

Question

My htaccess has this block in it:

RewriteRule ^login$ _user/login.php
RewriteRule ^login\.php$ _user/login.php
RewriteRule ^_user/login$ _user/login.php
RewriteRule ^_user/login\.php$ _user/login.php

How do I consolidate this block? The objective is to point to _user/login.php regardless of where on the server it's called from.

• atdc: My only other rules are similar to this aside from a filesmatch and the options. For now I just know I could be doing this better but am a fool when it comes to regex and don't fully understand the syntax of htaccess.

Answer 1

The last rule is completely superfluous, but harmless: it just maps the desired URL to itself.

The four cases can be combined into one rule:

RewriteRule ^(_user/)?login(\.php)?$ _user/login.php

In a regular expression, (something)? makes the something optional. That is, whether the URL starts with _user/ or not, and whether the URL ends with .php or not, it will get mapped to the desired login page.

• atdc: Thank you! I was trying other things earlier with (.*) but never knew about ? This answer works perfectly but leads me to my next question. I forgot that I always wanted the url to display site/login and hide the subdirectory. Is that just a complicated rewriterule? Sometimes I feel like I'm going in the wrong direction.

Answer 2

Some remarks about the bigger picture:

What is your goal with this? Why are you mapping four differnt urls to the same resource?

It it generally a bad idea to have multiple URLs display the same content. (Google "duplicate content").

Instead you should have all those additional URLs redirect to one canonical URL - if you actually need those additional URLs. You should design your site, so that only one URL is necessary.

• atdc: I have the login file called from two different files. In two different folders. I'll look into canonical URLs. Only one url is necessary, I more or less just want to direct "login" to the login page. [there's no REAL goal]