Mod Rewrite is driving me insane!!

[mopain]

Okay I need something very simple... and for some reason I just cant get it to work the way I want too..so heres my issue.

I have a domain , and the website content ,etc is located in a subdirectory off the domain ie. "http://mydomain.com/subdir"
what I want is for mod rewrite to fool browsers ,etc into the thinking that its all located under "http://mydomain.com"
right now I have it setup so when u go to http://mydomain.com it imediately drops you in the "http://mydomain.com/subdir" and then the website, but for better SEO purposes , and other personal reasons I want to eliminate the "/subdir/" all completely from the URL...I hope this is making sense so far... I'm at work and do not have FTP access so I cant post my current .htaccess file unfortunately...

[Technophile]

Sort of guessing you probably want something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/subdir(/)?$ /

But I'd know better if I saw what you were doing. I haven't used mod_rewrite before myself but it looks pretty simple. The regex's are the confusing part.

Oh, btw that regex should catch "/subdir" or "/subdir/". If you want to rewrite ANYTHING with "/subdir" in it, try removing the '^' and '$' characters.

[mopain]

will that hide the sub dir from the user??...

[Technophile]

No, it won't. Like I said it was a guess and I'd never used mod rewrite before. I think what you need to do is actually something like this:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$ subdir/

The FollowSymlinks option must be enabled for any rules to work. It's probably already enabled, but it doesn't hurt to specify it here as well. RewriteEngine On turns rewrite on of course. RewriteRule matches "" (nothing) after / (http://mydomain.com/), and redirects it to "subdir/". The URL that the user sees in their browser is still http://mydomain.com/. This time I had a way of testing it. It worked for me.

[mopain]

sweet!! I havnt tested it yet but very nice!! if it worked for you ... how did u figure it out? any particular websites that I missed??

[Technophile]

I pretty much looked at this page:
http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php
and this page:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

In my original post I had the wrong idea entirely and was trying to do it pretty much backwards. After realizing how it worked I got hung up because I was trying to match on ^/$. Apparently that works if you are doing it from httpd.conf, but not if you are doing it from .htaccess. When doing it from .htaccess you are limited to the local path which does not include the first "/" (if the .htaccess file was in /subdir/, the local path would start inside /subdir/). Also, trying to substitute "/subdir" wouldn't work because that apparently tries to go to "subdir" in "/" (the root of the drive), and doesn't just substitute "/subdir" for "/" in the URL. This stuff is definitely a lot more confusing than it looked at first glance. But after reading the docs a little bit it does pretty much make sense now.

[mopain]

cool that works like a charm btw!

[Technophile]

Sweet.