Pretty URLs without mod_rewrite, without .htaccess

Question

Without a possibility to access .htaccess I find myself in a creative impasse. There is no mod_rewriting for me. Nevertheless, I want to be able to do the nice stuff like:

http://www.example.com/Blog/2009/12/10/
http://www.example.com/Title_Of_This_Page

What are my alternatives?

In respond to the answers:

• I'm building with php5
• I don't have access to .htaccess
• http://www.example.com/index.php/Blog/ is a known technique but I don't prefer it. Is shows the php so to say.
• How would I create extensionless PHP-files? Would this do the trick?
• How much would using the custom 404 technique hurt performance?

Solution 1

If you've the permissions to set custom error documents for your server you could use this to redirect 404 requests.

E.g. for Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#errordocument)

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

In the index.php you then can proceed your request by using data from the $_SERVER array.

Solution 2

You can also have urls like

http://domain.com/index.php/Blog/Hello_World

out of the box with PHP5. You can then read the URL parameters using

echo $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];

Remember to validate/filter the PATH_INFO and all other request variables before using them in your application.

Solution 3

I know this question is very old but I didn't see anyone else suggest this possible solution...

You can get very close to what you want just by adding a question mark after the domain part of the URL, ie;

http://www.example.com/?Blog/2009/12/10/
http://www.example.com/?Title_Of_This_Page

Both of the above HTTP requests will now be handled by the same PHP script;

www.example.com/index.php

and in the index.php script, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] for the two pages above will be respectively;

Blog/2009/12/10/

Title_Of_This_Page

so you can handle them however you want.

Solution 4

A quite simple way is to:

• declare a 404 ErrorDocument (e.g. PHP) in .htaccess
• parse the query using $_SERVER and see if it corresponds to any result
• if so replace the HTTP status 404 with status 200 using header() and include index.php

Solution 5

If you omit a trailing slash, Apache will serve the first file [alphabetically] which matches that name, regardless of the extension, at least on the 2 servers I have access to.

I don't know how you might use this to solve your problem, but it may be useful at some point.

For example if http://www.somesite.com/abc.html and http://www.somesite.com/abc.php both exist and http://www.somesite.com/abc is requested, http://www.somesite.com/abc.html will be served.

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Comments

[Stefan Mai]

Ah, beat me to it. I thought about this for 5 minutes and finally came up with the same thing.

[chaos]

The document returned still has a HTTP 404 status on it, not a 200. This will cause a lot of problems with web crawlers.

[Piskvor left the building]

@chaos: <?php header('HTTP/1.1 200 OK'); ?>

[Piskvor left the building]

The question, again, becomes, how to do that w/o .htaccess. Some webhosts do offer a custom 404 in their configs, though, so this would be possible.

[Kriem]

I'm aware of this technique. I changed the question asking for a way without this method. It's an alternative nevertheless so you're right. I just don't prefer this one.

[Maciej Łebkowski]

You cannot POST (i.e., you can, but the data will be lost) to an error document script.

[instanceof me]

Right. I don't see any solution without either being able to choose (or edit) your 404 ErrorDocument or use a .htaccess, because you have to set this up at request-hendling level... Or use the solution you don't like: index.php/Blog/...

[chaos]

Yeah, I see that now. Edited per.

[Philippe Gerber]

@Maciej Łebkowski: that should not be a problem because clients usually do not POST to you themselves (you say when and to which resource).

[aalaap]

If you use switch-case, send a 200 OK header before the switch, send the 404 Not Found header in the default: case and finally wrap the whole router around with ob_start() and ob_end_flush(). This way the 200 gets sent to all, but the else case sends a 404, which overwrites the earlier 200.

[Synox]

You are refering to the Option MultiViews in apache. This option can have unwanted side effects. httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_negotiation.html

[Wes]

I actually just implemented something like this and found that the single question mark served well to call the index.php page without exposing it as the handler. it's not as clean but it still works without having to configure the web server rewrite rules.