Kohana Day 3: URL Rewriting

In the last Kohana tutorial, we start off with understanding of controller and action usage, and then went on with very basic usage.

One if your first webpage is http://localhost/kohana/index.php/page/about. The existence of /index.php/ may be bit of an eye sore and many desires for clean URLs, which is one of the given advantage by using an MVC framework.

Understanding URL Rewrite/Redirect

URL rewriting or redirecting is an ability on your web server (through extension) to navigate its webpages through certain web addresses.

For our example: we want to say http://mysite.com/page/contact to get to http://mysite.com/index.php/page/contact.

By using URL rewriting, you may gain the following:

Clean and friendly URL increase readability and SEO
Increase security by hiding actual file structure and limited accessible folders/files

mod_rewrite Module

mod_rewrite is a module included with Apache web server since version 1.3. This uses rule-based rewriting engine that able to rewrite your request URLs on the fly. It is designed to support large set of rules whether it’s regular expression, conditional or determined by server variables.

For further reading on mod_rewrite module:

You can find it as “rewrite_module” in WampServer. It is not enabled by default, always check its availability before attempt to debug the rewrite rules.

Checking mod_rewrite enabled in WampServer

Setting URL rewrite in Kohana

rename .htaccess

.htaccess file is where you define your rewrite rules. Kohana framework has provided an example.htaccess as template.

Rename the filename to .htaccess. You will have problem doing this in Windows has it doesn’t allow you to create file without filenames (since “htaccess” are treated as filetype by Windows). You can walk around this easily by going through DOS prompt using “ren” command.

Windows won't allow to rename/create files without a name

Renamed through DOS prompt

Update .htaccess file

Kohana has prepared an almost ready to go rules for you. You will however, need to set your RewriteBase if you are not working from root of virtual directory. In this tutorial, you are working off “kohana” folder, so it should be “RewriteBase /kohana/” and your .htaccess file should looks like:

# Turn on URL rewriting
RewriteEngine On
 
# Installation directory
RewriteBase /kohana/
 
# Protect application and system files from being viewed
RewriteRule ^(application|modules|system) - [F,L]
 
# Allow any files or directories that exist to be displayed directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 
# Rewrite all other URLs to index.php/URL
RewriteRule .* index.php/$0 [PT,L]

Update bootstrap

Next is to update your bootstripe file in \application\bootstrap.php to omit index.php file by modify your Kohana initialisation setting:

/**
 * Initialize Kohana, setting the default options.
 *
 * The following options are available:
 *
 * - string   base_url    path, and optionally domain, of your application   NULL
 * - string   index_file  name of your index file, usually "index.php"       index.php
 * - string   charset     internal character set used for input and output   utf-8
 * - string   cache_dir   set the internal cache directory                   APPPATH/cache
 * - boolean  errors      enable or disable error handling                   TRUE
 * - boolean  profile     enable or disable internal profiling               TRUE
 * - boolean  caching     enable or disable internal caching                 FALSE
 */
Kohana::init(array(
	'base_url'   => '/kohana',
    'index_file' => FALSE
));

Now try to access with following URLs again:

http://localhost/kohana/page/about
http://localhost/kohana/index.php/page/about
http://localhost/kohana/page/contact
http://localhost/kohana/index.php/page/contact

You now have URL rewriting working where you can access to your web pages with index.php and without!

All examples after this tutorial will not have /index.php/ in the sample URLs. You may continue working on tutorials as normal without URL rewritings, just remember to add /index.php/ before your routines.

Summary

This is the day 3 of Kohana tutorial series, covering the URL rewriting and basics on mod_rewrite module.

Travis Blog