RewriteRule Error: Bad flag delimiters

Question

Using this RewriteRule in my .htaccess file I'm getting RewriteRule: Bad flag delimiters which is returning a 500 error in the browser. Can anyone point me in the right direction please. Thanks.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^dev/(.*)$ http://dev.example.com/$1 [L,R=301, NC]

This is on Ubuntu on a Digital Ocean Droplet.

Solution 1

Turns out it was because of the space before N in the flag declaration [L,R=301, NC]. I changed it to [L,R=301,NC] and now it works a treat.

Solution 2

Check at the link below, and it will give you the line with error, which will be straight forward to fix

http://www.htaccesscheck.com/index.html

In your case it will clearly specify the bad flags in the below line, which can be corrected in their editor and check there itself.

RewriteRule ^dev/(.*)$ http://dev.example.com/$1 [L,R=301, NC]

to

RewriteRule ^dev/(.*)$ http://dev.example.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

Comments

[Edwin Krause]

Thanks for that. I moved a page from Ubuntu 14 to Ubuntu 18, the space was working fine on the Ubuntu 14 machine!

[Yusuf Çağlar]

Its great that single blank space can cause error. Thank you for teaching me that