<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy, see www.w3.org" />

    <title>Apache 1.3 URL Rewriting Guide</title>
  </head>
  <!-- Background white, links blue (unvisited), navy (visited), red (active) -->

  <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" link="#0000FF"
  vlink="#000080" alink="#FF0000">
    <blockquote>
      <!--#include virtual="header.html" -->

      <div align="CENTER">
        <h1>Apache 1.3<br />
         URL Rewriting Guide<br />
        </h1>

        <address>
          Originally written by<br />
           Ralf S. Engelschall &lt;rse@apache.org&gt;<br />
           December 1997
        </address>
      </div>

      <p>This document supplements the mod_rewrite <a
      href="../mod/mod_rewrite.html">reference documentation</a>.
      It describes how one can use Apache's mod_rewrite to solve
      typical URL-based problems with which webmasters are often 
      confronted. We give detailed descriptions on how to
      solve each problem by configuring URL rewriting rulesets.</p>

      <h2><a id="ToC1" name="ToC1">Introduction to
      mod_rewrite</a></h2>
      The Apache module mod_rewrite is a killer one, i.e. it is a
      really sophisticated module which provides a powerful way to
      do URL manipulations. With it you can do nearly all types of
      URL manipulations you ever dreamed about. The price you have
      to pay is to accept complexity, because mod_rewrite's major
      drawback is that it is not easy to understand and use for the
      beginner. And even Apache experts sometimes discover new
      aspects where mod_rewrite can help. 

      <p>In other words: With mod_rewrite you either shoot yourself
      in the foot the first time and never use it again or love it
      for the rest of your life because of its power. This paper
      tries to give you a few initial success events to avoid the
      first case by presenting already invented solutions to
      you.</p>

      <h2><a id="ToC2" name="ToC2">Practical Solutions</a></h2>
      Here come a lot of practical solutions I've either invented
      myself or collected from other peoples solutions in the past.
      Feel free to learn the black magic of URL rewriting from
      these examples. 

      <table bgcolor="#FFE0E0" border="0" cellspacing="0"
      cellpadding="5">
        <tr>
          <td>ATTENTION: Depending on your server-configuration it
          can be necessary to slightly change the examples for your
          situation, e.g. adding the [PT] flag when additionally
          using mod_alias and mod_userdir, etc. Or rewriting a
          ruleset to fit in <code>.htaccess</code> context instead
          of per-server context. Always try to understand what a
          particular ruleset really does before you use it in order to
          avoid problems.</td>
        </tr>
      </table>

      <h1>URL Layout</h1>

      <h2>Canonical URLs</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>On some webservers there are more than one URL for a
        resource. Usually there are canonical URLs (which should be
        actually used and distributed) and those which are just
        shortcuts, internal ones, etc. Independent which URL the
        user supplied with the request he should finally see the
        canonical one only.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We do an external HTTP redirect for all non-canonical
          URLs to fix them in the location view of the Browser and
          for all subsequent requests. In the example ruleset below
          we replace <code>/~user</code> by the canonical
          <code>/u/user</code> and fix a missing trailing slash for
          <code>/u/user</code>. 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteRule   ^/<strong>~</strong>([^/]+)/?(.*)    /<strong>u</strong>/$1/$2  [<strong>R</strong>]
RewriteRule   ^/([uge])/(<strong>[^/]+</strong>)$  /$1/$2<strong>/</strong>   [<strong>R</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Canonical Hostnames</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>The goal of this rule is to force the use of a particular
        hostname, in preference to other hostnames which may be used to
        reach the same site. For example, if you wish to force the use
        of <strong>www.example.com</strong> instead of
        <strong>example.com</strong>, you might use a variant of the
        following recipe.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
# For sites running on a port other than 80
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^fully\.qualified\.domain\.name [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^$
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^80$
RewriteRule ^/(.*)         http://fully.qualified.domain.name:%{SERVER_PORT}/$1 [L,R]

# And for a site running on port 80
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^fully\.qualified\.domain\.name [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*)         http://fully.qualified.domain.name/$1 [L,R]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Moved DocumentRoot</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Usually the DocumentRoot of the webserver directly
        relates to the URL ``<code>/</code>''. But often this data
        is not really of top-level priority, it is perhaps just one
        entity of a lot of data pools. For instance at our Intranet
        sites there are <code>/e/www/</code> (the homepage for
        WWW), <code>/e/sww/</code> (the homepage for the Intranet)
        etc. Now because the data of the DocumentRoot stays at
        <code>/e/www/</code> we had to make sure that all inlined
        images and other stuff inside this data pool work for
        subsequent requests.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We just redirect the URL <code>/</code> to
          <code>/e/www/</code>. While is seems trivial it is
          actually trivial with mod_rewrite, only. Because the
          typical old mechanisms of URL <em>Aliases</em> (as
          provides by mod_alias and friends) only used
          <em>prefix</em> matching. With this you cannot do such a
          redirection because the DocumentRoot is a prefix of all
          URLs. With mod_rewrite it is really trivial: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule   <strong>^/$</strong>  /e/www/  [<strong>R</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Trailing Slash Problem</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Every webmaster can sing a song about the problem of
        the trailing slash on URLs referencing directories. If they
        are missing, the server dumps an error, because if you say
        <code>/~quux/foo</code> instead of <code>/~quux/foo/</code>
        then the server searches for a <em>file</em> named
        <code>foo</code>. And because this file is a directory it
        complains. Actually is tries to fix it themself in most of
        the cases, but sometimes this mechanism need to be emulated
        by you. For instance after you have done a lot of
        complicated URL rewritings to CGI scripts etc.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          The solution to this subtle problem is to let the server
          add the trailing slash automatically. To do this
          correctly we have to use an external redirect, so the
          browser correctly requests subsequent images etc. If we
          only did a internal rewrite, this would only work for the
          directory page, but would go wrong when any images are
          included into this page with relative URLs, because the
          browser would request an in-lined object. For instance, a
          request for <code>image.gif</code> in
          <code>/~quux/foo/index.html</code> would become
          <code>/~quux/image.gif</code> without the external
          redirect! 

          <p>So, to do this trick we write:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteBase    /~quux/
RewriteRule    ^foo<strong>$</strong>  foo<strong>/</strong>  [<strong>R</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>The crazy and lazy can even do the following in the
          top-level <code>.htaccess</code> file of their homedir.
          But notice that this creates some processing
          overhead.</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteBase    /~quux/
RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  <strong>-d</strong>
RewriteRule    ^(.+<strong>[^/]</strong>)$           $1<strong>/</strong>  [R]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Webcluster through Homogeneous URL Layout</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>We want to create a homogenous and consistent URL
        layout over all WWW servers on a Intranet webcluster, i.e.
        all URLs (per definition server local and thus server
        dependent!) become actually server <em>independed</em>!
        What we want is to give the WWW namespace a consistent
        server-independend layout: no URL should have to include
        any physically correct target server. The cluster itself
        should drive us automatically to the physical target
        host.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          First, the knowledge of the target servers come from
          (distributed) external maps which contain information
          where our users, groups and entities stay. The have the
          form 
<pre>
user1  server_of_user1
user2  server_of_user2
:      :
</pre>

          <p>We put them into files <code>map.xxx-to-host</code>.
          Second we need to instruct all servers to redirect URLs
          of the forms</p>
<pre>
/u/user/anypath
/g/group/anypath
/e/entity/anypath
</pre>

          <p>to</p>
<pre>
http://physical-host/u/user/anypath
http://physical-host/g/group/anypath
http://physical-host/e/entity/anypath
</pre>

          <p>when the URL is not locally valid to a server. The
          following ruleset does this for us by the help of the map
          files (assuming that server0 is a default server which
          will be used if a user has no entry in the map):</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on

RewriteMap      user-to-host   txt:/path/to/map.user-to-host
RewriteMap     group-to-host   txt:/path/to/map.group-to-host
RewriteMap    entity-to-host   txt:/path/to/map.entity-to-host

RewriteRule   ^/u/<strong>([^/]+)</strong>/?(.*)   http://<strong>${user-to-host:$1|server0}</strong>/u/$1/$2
RewriteRule   ^/g/<strong>([^/]+)</strong>/?(.*)  http://<strong>${group-to-host:$1|server0}</strong>/g/$1/$2
RewriteRule   ^/e/<strong>([^/]+)</strong>/?(.*) http://<strong>${entity-to-host:$1|server0}</strong>/e/$1/$2

RewriteRule   ^/([uge])/([^/]+)/?$          /$1/$2/.www/
RewriteRule   ^/([uge])/([^/]+)/([^.]+.+)   /$1/$2/.www/$3\
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Move Homedirs to Different Webserver</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>A lot of webmaster aksed for a solution to the
        following situation: They wanted to redirect just all
        homedirs on a webserver to another webserver. They usually
        need such things when establishing a newer webserver which
        will replace the old one over time.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          The solution is trivial with mod_rewrite. On the old
          webserver we just redirect all
          <code>/~user/anypath</code> URLs to
          <code>http://newserver/~user/anypath</code>. 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule   ^/~(.+)  http://<strong>newserver</strong>/~$1  [R,L]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Structured Homedirs</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Some sites with thousend of users usually use a
        structured homedir layout, i.e. each homedir is in a
        subdirectory which begins for instance with the first
        character of the username. So, <code>/~foo/anypath</code>
        is <code>/home/<strong>f</strong>/foo/.www/anypath</code>
        while <code>/~bar/anypath</code> is
        <code>/home/<strong>b</strong>/bar/.www/anypath</code>.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We use the following ruleset to expand the tilde URLs
          into exactly the above layout. 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule   ^/~(<strong>([a-z])</strong>[a-z0-9]+)(.*)  /home/<strong>$2</strong>/$1/.www$3
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Filesystem Reorganisation</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          This really is a hardcore example: a killer application
          which heavily uses per-directory
          <code>RewriteRules</code> to get a smooth look and feel
          on the Web while its data structure is never touched or
          adjusted. Background: <strong><em>net.sw</em></strong> is
          my archive of freely available Unix software packages,
          which I started to collect in 1992. It is both my hobby
          and job to to this, because while I'm studying computer
          science I have also worked for many years as a system and
          network administrator in my spare time. Every week I need
          some sort of software so I created a deep hierarchy of
          directories where I stored the packages: 
<pre>
drwxrwxr-x   2 netsw  users    512 Aug  3 18:39 Audio/
drwxrwxr-x   2 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 14:37 Benchmark/
drwxrwxr-x  12 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 00:34 Crypto/
drwxrwxr-x   5 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 00:41 Database/
drwxrwxr-x   4 netsw  users    512 Jul 30 19:25 Dicts/
drwxrwxr-x  10 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 01:54 Graphic/
drwxrwxr-x   5 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 01:58 Hackers/
drwxrwxr-x   8 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 03:19 InfoSys/
drwxrwxr-x   3 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 03:21 Math/
drwxrwxr-x   3 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 03:24 Misc/
drwxrwxr-x   9 netsw  users    512 Aug  1 16:33 Network/
drwxrwxr-x   2 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 05:53 Office/
drwxrwxr-x   7 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 09:24 SoftEng/
drwxrwxr-x   7 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 12:17 System/
drwxrwxr-x  12 netsw  users    512 Aug  3 20:15 Typesetting/
drwxrwxr-x  10 netsw  users    512 Jul  9 14:08 X11/
</pre>

          <p>In July 1996 I decided to make this archive public to
          the world via a nice Web interface. "Nice" means that I
          wanted to offer an interface where you can browse
          directly through the archive hierarchy. And "nice" means
          that I didn't wanted to change anything inside this
          hierarchy - not even by putting some CGI scripts at the
          top of it. Why? Because the above structure should be
          later accessible via FTP as well, and I didn't want any
          Web or CGI stuff to be there.</p>
        </dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          The solution has two parts: The first is a set of CGI
          scripts which create all the pages at all directory
          levels on-the-fly. I put them under
          <code>/e/netsw/.www/</code> as follows: 
<pre>
-rw-r--r--   1 netsw  users    1318 Aug  1 18:10 .wwwacl
drwxr-xr-x  18 netsw  users     512 Aug  5 15:51 DATA/
-rw-rw-rw-   1 netsw  users  372982 Aug  5 16:35 LOGFILE
-rw-r--r--   1 netsw  users     659 Aug  4 09:27 TODO
-rw-r--r--   1 netsw  users    5697 Aug  1 18:01 netsw-about.html
-rwxr-xr-x   1 netsw  users     579 Aug  2 10:33 netsw-access.pl
-rwxr-xr-x   1 netsw  users    1532 Aug  1 17:35 netsw-changes.cgi
-rwxr-xr-x   1 netsw  users    2866 Aug  5 14:49 netsw-home.cgi
drwxr-xr-x   2 netsw  users     512 Jul  8 23:47 netsw-img/
-rwxr-xr-x   1 netsw  users   24050 Aug  5 15:49 netsw-lsdir.cgi
-rwxr-xr-x   1 netsw  users    1589 Aug  3 18:43 netsw-search.cgi
-rwxr-xr-x   1 netsw  users    1885 Aug  1 17:41 netsw-tree.cgi
-rw-r--r--   1 netsw  users     234 Jul 30 16:35 netsw-unlimit.lst
</pre>

          <p>The <code>DATA/</code> subdirectory holds the above
          directory structure, i.e. the real
          <strong><em>net.sw</em></strong> stuff and gets
          automatically updated via <code>rdist</code> from time to
          time. The second part of the problem remains: how to link
          these two structures together into one smooth-looking URL
          tree? We want to hide the <code>DATA/</code> directory
          from the user while running the appropriate CGI scripts
          for the various URLs. Here is the solution: first I put
          the following into the per-directory configuration file
          in the Document Root of the server to rewrite the
          announced URL <code>/net.sw/</code> to the internal path
          <code>/e/netsw</code>:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteRule  ^net.sw$       net.sw/        [R]
RewriteRule  ^net.sw/(.*)$  e/netsw/$1
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>The first rule is for requests which miss the trailing
          slash! The second rule does the real thing. And then
          comes the killer configuration which stays in the
          per-directory config file
          <code>/e/netsw/.www/.wwwacl</code>:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
Options       ExecCGI FollowSymLinks Includes MultiViews 

RewriteEngine on

#  we are reached via /net.sw/ prefix
RewriteBase   /net.sw/

#  first we rewrite the root dir to 
#  the handling cgi script
RewriteRule   ^$                       netsw-home.cgi     [L]
RewriteRule   ^index\.html$            netsw-home.cgi     [L]

#  strip out the subdirs when
#  the browser requests us from perdir pages
RewriteRule   ^.+/(netsw-[^/]+/.+)$    $1                 [L]

#  and now break the rewriting for local files
RewriteRule   ^netsw-home\.cgi.*       -                  [L]
RewriteRule   ^netsw-changes\.cgi.*    -                  [L]
RewriteRule   ^netsw-search\.cgi.*     -                  [L]
RewriteRule   ^netsw-tree\.cgi$        -                  [L]
RewriteRule   ^netsw-about\.html$      -                  [L]
RewriteRule   ^netsw-img/.*$           -                  [L]

#  anything else is a subdir which gets handled
#  by another cgi script
RewriteRule   !^netsw-lsdir\.cgi.*     -                  [C]
RewriteRule   (.*)                     netsw-lsdir.cgi/$1
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>Some hints for interpretation:</p>

          <ol>
            <li>Notice the L (last) flag and no substitution field
            ('-') in the forth part</li>

            <li>Notice the ! (not) character and the C (chain) flag
            at the first rule in the last part</li>

            <li>Notice the catch-all pattern in the last rule</li>
          </ol>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>NCSA imagemap to Apache mod_imap</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>When switching from the NCSA webserver to the more
        modern Apache webserver a lot of people want a smooth
        transition. So they want pages which use their old NCSA
        <code>imagemap</code> program to work under Apache with the
        modern <code>mod_imap</code>. The problem is that there are
        a lot of hyperlinks around which reference the
        <code>imagemap</code> program via
        <code>/cgi-bin/imagemap/path/to/page.map</code>. Under
        Apache this has to read just
        <code>/path/to/page.map</code>.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We use a global rule to remove the prefix on-the-fly for
          all requests: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteRule    ^/cgi-bin/imagemap(.*)  $1  [PT]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Search pages in more than one directory</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Sometimes it is neccessary to let the webserver search
        for pages in more than one directory. Here MultiViews or
        other techniques cannot help.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We program a explicit ruleset which searches for the
          files in the directories. 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on

#   first try to find it in custom/...
#   ...and if found stop and be happy:
RewriteCond         /your/docroot/<strong>dir1</strong>/%{REQUEST_FILENAME}  -f
RewriteRule  ^(.+)  /your/docroot/<strong>dir1</strong>/$1  [L]

#   second try to find it in pub/...
#   ...and if found stop and be happy:
RewriteCond         /your/docroot/<strong>dir2</strong>/%{REQUEST_FILENAME}  -f
RewriteRule  ^(.+)  /your/docroot/<strong>dir2</strong>/$1  [L]

#   else go on for other Alias or ScriptAlias directives,
#   etc.
RewriteRule   ^(.+)  -  [PT]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Set Environment Variables According To URL Parts</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Perhaps you want to keep status information between
        requests and use the URL to encode it. But you don't want
        to use a CGI wrapper for all pages just to strip out this
        information.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We use a rewrite rule to strip out the status information
          and remember it via an environment variable which can be
          later dereferenced from within XSSI or CGI. This way a
          URL <code>/foo/S=java/bar/</code> gets translated to
          <code>/foo/bar/</code> and the environment variable named
          <code>STATUS</code> is set to the value "java". 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule   ^(.*)/<strong>S=([^/]+)</strong>/(.*)    $1/$3 [E=<strong>STATUS:$2</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Virtual User Hosts</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Assume that you want to provide
        <code>www.<strong>username</strong>.host.domain.com</code>
        for the homepage of username via just DNS A records to the
        same machine and without any virtualhosts on this
        machine.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          For HTTP/1.0 requests there is no solution, but for
          HTTP/1.1 requests which contain a Host: HTTP header we
          can use the following ruleset to rewrite
          <code>http://www.username.host.com/anypath</code>
          internally to <code>/home/username/anypath</code>: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond   %{<strong>HTTP_HOST</strong>}                 ^www\.<strong>[^.]+</strong>\.host\.com$
RewriteRule   ^(.+)                        %{HTTP_HOST}$1          [C]
RewriteRule   ^www\.<strong>([^.]+)</strong>\.host\.com(.*) /home/<strong>$1</strong>$2
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Redirect Homedirs For Foreigners</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>We want to redirect homedir URLs to another webserver
        <code>www.somewhere.com</code> when the requesting user
        does not stay in the local domain
        <code>ourdomain.com</code>. This is sometimes used in
        virtual host contexts.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          Just a rewrite condition: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond   %{REMOTE_HOST}  <strong>!^.+\.ourdomain\.com$</strong>
RewriteRule   ^(/~.+)         http://www.somewhere.com/$1 [R,L]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Redirect Failing URLs To Other Webserver</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>A typical FAQ about URL rewriting is how to redirect
        failing requests on webserver A to webserver B. Usually
        this is done via ErrorDocument CGI-scripts in Perl, but
        there is also a mod_rewrite solution. But notice that this
        is less performant than using a ErrorDocument
        CGI-script!</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          The first solution has the best performance but less
          flexibility and is less error safe: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond   /your/docroot/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} <strong>!-f</strong>
RewriteRule   ^(.+)                             http://<strong>webserverB</strong>.dom/$1
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>The problem here is that this will only work for pages
          inside the DocumentRoot. While you can add more
          Conditions (for instance to also handle homedirs, etc.)
          there is better variant:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_URI} <strong>!-U</strong>
RewriteRule   ^(.+)          http://<strong>webserverB</strong>.dom/$1
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>This uses the URL look-ahead feature of mod_rewrite.
          The result is that this will work for all types of URLs
          and is a safe way. But it does a performance impact on
          the webserver, because for every request there is one
          more internal subrequest. So, if your webserver runs on a
          powerful CPU, use this one. If it is a slow machine, use
          the first approach or better a ErrorDocument
          CGI-script.</p>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Extended Redirection</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Sometimes we need more control (concerning the
        character escaping mechanism) of URLs on redirects. Usually
        the Apache kernels URL escape function also escapes
        anchors, i.e. URLs like "url#anchor". You cannot use this
        directly on redirects with mod_rewrite because the
        uri_escape() function of Apache would also escape the hash
        character. How can we redirect to such a URL?</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We have to use a kludge by the use of a NPH-CGI script
          which does the redirect itself. Because here no escaping
          is done (NPH=non-parseable headers). First we introduce a
          new URL scheme <code>xredirect:</code> by the following
          per-server config-line (should be one of the last rewrite
          rules): 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteRule ^xredirect:(.+) /path/to/nph-xredirect.cgi/$1 \
            [T=application/x-httpd-cgi,L]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>This forces all URLs prefixed with
          <code>xredirect:</code> to be piped through the
          <code>nph-xredirect.cgi</code> program. And this program
          just looks like:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
#!/path/to/perl
##
##  nph-xredirect.cgi -- NPH/CGI script for extended redirects
##  Copyright (c) 1997 Ralf S. Engelschall, All Rights Reserved. 
##

$| = 1;
$url = $ENV{'PATH_INFO'};

print "HTTP/1.0 302 Moved Temporarily\n";
print "Server: $ENV{'SERVER_SOFTWARE'}\n";
print "Location: $url\n";
print "Content-type: text/html\n";
print "\n";
print "&lt;html&gt;\n";
print "&lt;head&gt;\n";
print "&lt;title&gt;302 Moved Temporarily (EXTENDED)&lt;/title&gt;\n";
print "&lt;/head&gt;\n";
print "&lt;body&gt;\n";
print "&lt;h1&gt;Moved Temporarily (EXTENDED)&lt;/h1&gt;\n";
print "The document has moved &lt;a HREF=\"$url\"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;\n";
print "&lt;/body&gt;\n";
print "&lt;/html&gt;\n";

##EOF##
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>This provides you with the functionality to do
          redirects to all URL schemes, i.e. including the one
          which are not directly accepted by mod_rewrite. For
          instance you can now also redirect to
          <code>news:newsgroup</code> via</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteRule ^anyurl  xredirect:news:newsgroup
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>Notice: You have not to put [R] or [R,L] to the above
          rule because the <code>xredirect:</code> need to be
          expanded later by our special "pipe through" rule
          above.</p>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Archive Access Multiplexer</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Do you know the great CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive
        Network) under <a
        href="http://www.perl.com/CPAN">http://www.perl.com/CPAN</a>?
        This does a redirect to one of several FTP servers around
        the world which carry a CPAN mirror and is approximately
        near the location of the requesting client. Actually this
        can be called an FTP access multiplexing service. While
        CPAN runs via CGI scripts, how can a similar approach
        implemented via mod_rewrite?</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          First we notice that from version 3.0.0 mod_rewrite can
          also use the "ftp:" scheme on redirects. And second, the
          location approximation can be done by a rewritemap over
          the top-level domain of the client. With a tricky chained
          ruleset we can use this top-level domain as a key to our
          multiplexing map. 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap    multiplex                txt:/path/to/map.cxan
RewriteRule   ^/CxAN/(.*)              %{REMOTE_HOST}::$1                 [C]
RewriteRule   ^.+\.<strong>([a-zA-Z]+)</strong>::(.*)$  ${multiplex:<strong>$1</strong>|ftp.default.dom}$2  [R,L]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
##
##  map.cxan -- Multiplexing Map for CxAN
##

de        ftp://ftp.cxan.de/CxAN/
uk        ftp://ftp.cxan.uk/CxAN/
com       ftp://ftp.cxan.com/CxAN/
 :
##EOF##
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Time-Dependend Rewriting</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>When tricks like time-dependend content should happen a
        lot of webmasters still use CGI scripts which do for
        instance redirects to specialized pages. How can it be done
        via mod_rewrite?</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          There are a lot of variables named <code>TIME_xxx</code>
          for rewrite conditions. In conjunction with the special
          lexicographic comparison patterns &lt;STRING, &gt;STRING
          and =STRING we can do time-dependend redirects: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond   %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} &gt;0700
RewriteCond   %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} &lt;1900
RewriteRule   ^foo\.html$             foo.day.html
RewriteRule   ^foo\.html$             foo.night.html
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>This provides the content of <code>foo.day.html</code>
          under the URL <code>foo.html</code> from 07:00-19:00 and
          at the remaining time the contents of
          <code>foo.night.html</code>. Just a nice feature for a
          homepage...</p>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Backward Compatibility for YYYY to XXXX migration</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>How can we make URLs backward compatible (still
        existing virtually) after migrating document.YYYY to
        document.XXXX, e.g. after translating a bunch of .html
        files to .phtml?</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We just rewrite the name to its basename and test for
          existence of the new extension. If it exists, we take
          that name, else we rewrite the URL to its original state.
          

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
#   backward compatibility ruleset for 
#   rewriting document.html to document.phtml
#   when and only when document.phtml exists
#   but no longer document.html
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase   /~quux/
#   parse out basename, but remember the fact
RewriteRule   ^(.*)\.html$              $1      [C,E=WasHTML:yes]
#   rewrite to document.phtml if exists
RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.phtml -f
RewriteRule   ^(.*)$ $1.phtml                   [S=1]
#   else reverse the previous basename cutout
RewriteCond   %{ENV:WasHTML}            ^yes$
RewriteRule   ^(.*)$ $1.html
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h1>Content Handling</h1>

      <h2>From Old to New (intern)</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Assume we have recently renamed the page
        <code>foo.html</code> to <code>bar.html</code> and now want
        to provide the old URL for backward compatibility. Actually
        we want that users of the old URL even not recognize that
        the pages was renamed.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We rewrite the old URL to the new one internally via the
          following rule: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteBase    /~quux/
RewriteRule    ^<strong>foo</strong>\.html$  <strong>bar</strong>.html
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>From Old to New (extern)</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Assume again that we have recently renamed the page
        <code>foo.html</code> to <code>bar.html</code> and now want
        to provide the old URL for backward compatibility. But this
        time we want that the users of the old URL get hinted to
        the new one, i.e. their browsers Location field should
        change, too.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We force a HTTP redirect to the new URL which leads to a
          change of the browsers and thus the users view: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteBase    /~quux/
RewriteRule    ^<strong>foo</strong>\.html$  <strong>bar</strong>.html  [<strong>R</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Browser Dependend Content</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>At least for important top-level pages it is sometimes
        necesarry to provide the optimum of browser dependend
        content, i.e. one has to provide a maximum version for the
        latest Netscape variants, a minimum version for the Lynx
        browsers and a average feature version for all others.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We cannot use content negotiation because the browsers do
          not provide their type in that form. Instead we have to
          act on the HTTP header "User-Agent". The following condig
          does the following: If the HTTP header "User-Agent"
          begins with "Mozilla/3", the page <code>foo.html</code>
          is rewritten to <code>foo.NS.html</code> and and the
          rewriting stops. If the browser is "Lynx" or "Mozilla" of
          version 1 or 2 the URL becomes <code>foo.20.html</code>.
          All other browsers receive page <code>foo.32.html</code>.
          This is done by the following ruleset: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}  ^<strong>Mozilla/3</strong>.*
RewriteRule ^foo\.html$         foo.<strong>NS</strong>.html          [<strong>L</strong>]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}  ^<strong>Lynx/</strong>.*         [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}  ^<strong>Mozilla/[12]</strong>.*
RewriteRule ^foo\.html$         foo.<strong>20</strong>.html          [<strong>L</strong>]

RewriteRule ^foo\.html$         foo.<strong>32</strong>.html          [<strong>L</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Dynamic Mirror</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Assume there are nice webpages on remote hosts we want
        to bring into our namespace. For FTP servers we would use
        the <code>mirror</code> program which actually maintains an
        explicit up-to-date copy of the remote data on the local
        machine. For a webserver we could use the program
        <code>webcopy</code> which acts similar via HTTP. But both
        techniques have one major drawback: The local copy is
        always just as up-to-date as often we run the program. It
        would be much better if the mirror is not a static one we
        have to establish explicitly. Instead we want a dynamic
        mirror with data which gets updated automatically when
        there is need (updated data on the remote host).</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          To provide this feature we map the remote webpage or even
          the complete remote webarea to our namespace by the use
          of the <i>Proxy Throughput</i> feature (flag [P]): 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteBase    /~quux/
RewriteRule    ^<strong>hotsheet/</strong>(.*)$  <strong>http://www.tstimpreso.com/hotsheet/</strong>$1  [<strong>P</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteBase    /~quux/
RewriteRule    ^<strong>usa-news\.html</strong>$   <strong>http://www.quux-corp.com/news/index.html</strong>  [<strong>P</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Reverse Dynamic Mirror</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>...</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond   /mirror/of/remotesite/$1           -U 
RewriteRule   ^http://www\.remotesite\.com/(.*)$ /mirror/of/remotesite/$1
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Retrieve Missing Data from Intranet</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>This is a tricky way of virtually running a corporates
        (external) Internet webserver
        (<code>www.quux-corp.dom</code>), while actually keeping
        and maintaining its data on a (internal) Intranet webserver
        (<code>www2.quux-corp.dom</code>) which is protected by a
        firewall. The trick is that on the external webserver we
        retrieve the requested data on-the-fly from the internal
        one.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          First, we have to make sure that our firewall still
          protects the internal webserver and that only the
          external webserver is allowed to retrieve data from it.
          For a packet-filtering firewall we could for instance
          configure a firewall ruleset like the following: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
<strong>ALLOW</strong> Host www.quux-corp.dom Port &gt;1024 --&gt; Host www2.quux-corp.dom Port <strong>80</strong>  
<strong>DENY</strong>  Host *                 Port *     --&gt; Host www2.quux-corp.dom Port <strong>80</strong>
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>Just adjust it to your actual configuration syntax.
          Now we can establish the mod_rewrite rules which request
          the missing data in the background through the proxy
          throughput feature:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteRule ^/~([^/]+)/?(.*)          /home/$1/.www/$2
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}       <strong>!-f</strong>
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}       <strong>!-d</strong>
RewriteRule ^/home/([^/]+)/.www/?(.*) http://<strong>www2</strong>.quux-corp.dom/~$1/pub/$2 [<strong>P</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Load Balancing</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Suppose we want to load balance the traffic to
        <code>www.foo.com</code> over <code>www[0-5].foo.com</code>
        (a total of 6 servers). How can this be done?</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          There are a lot of possible solutions for this problem.
          We will discuss first a commonly known DNS-based variant
          and then the special one with mod_rewrite: 

          <ol>
            <li>
              <strong>DNS Round-Robin</strong> 

              <p>The simplest method for load-balancing is to use
              the DNS round-robin feature of BIND. Here you just
              configure <code>www[0-9].foo.com</code> as usual in
              your DNS with A(address) records, e.g.</p>

              <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
              cellpadding="5">
                <tr>
                  <td>
<pre>
www0   IN  A       1.2.3.1
www1   IN  A       1.2.3.2
www2   IN  A       1.2.3.3
www3   IN  A       1.2.3.4
www4   IN  A       1.2.3.5
www5   IN  A       1.2.3.6
</pre>
                  </td>
                </tr>
              </table>

              <p>Then you additionally add the following entry:</p>

              <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
              cellpadding="5">
                <tr>
                  <td>
<pre>
www    IN  CNAME   www0.foo.com.
       IN  CNAME   www1.foo.com.
       IN  CNAME   www2.foo.com.
       IN  CNAME   www3.foo.com.
       IN  CNAME   www4.foo.com.
       IN  CNAME   www5.foo.com.
       IN  CNAME   www6.foo.com.
</pre>
                  </td>
                </tr>
              </table>

              <p>Notice that this seems wrong, but is actually an
              intended feature of BIND and can be used in this way.
              However, now when <code>www.foo.com</code> gets
              resolved, BIND gives out <code>www0-www6</code> - but
              in a slightly permutated/rotated order every time.
              This way the clients are spread over the various
              servers. But notice that this not a perfect load
              balancing scheme, because DNS resolve information
              gets cached by the other nameservers on the net, so
              once a client has resolved <code>www.foo.com</code>
              to a particular <code>wwwN.foo.com</code>, all
              subsequent requests also go to this particular name
              <code>wwwN.foo.com</code>. But the final result is
              ok, because the total sum of the requests are really
              spread over the various webservers.</p>
            </li>

            <li>
              <strong>DNS Load-Balancing</strong> 

              <p>A sophisticated DNS-based method for
              load-balancing is to use the program
              <code>lbnamed</code> which can be found at <a
              href="http://www.stanford.edu/~schemers/docs/lbnamed/lbnamed.html">
              http://www.stanford.edu/~schemers/docs/lbnamed/lbnamed.html</a>.
              It is a Perl 5 program in conjunction with auxilliary
              tools which provides a real load-balancing for
              DNS.</p>
            </li>

            <li>
              <strong>Proxy Throughput Round-Robin</strong> 

              <p>In this variant we use mod_rewrite and its proxy
              throughput feature. First we dedicate
              <code>www0.foo.com</code> to be actually
              <code>www.foo.com</code> by using a single</p>

              <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
              cellpadding="5">
                <tr>
                  <td>
<pre>
www    IN  CNAME   www0.foo.com.
</pre>
                  </td>
                </tr>
              </table>

              <p>entry in the DNS. Then we convert
              <code>www0.foo.com</code> to a proxy-only server,
              i.e. we configure this machine so all arriving URLs
              are just pushed through the internal proxy to one of
              the 5 other servers (<code>www1-www5</code>). To
              accomplish this we first establish a ruleset which
              contacts a load balancing script <code>lb.pl</code>
              for all URLs.</p>

              <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
              cellpadding="5">
                <tr>
                  <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap    lb      prg:/path/to/lb.pl
RewriteRule   ^/(.+)$ ${lb:$1}           [P,L]
</pre>
                  </td>
                </tr>
              </table>

              <p>Then we write <code>lb.pl</code>:</p>

              <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
              cellpadding="5">
                <tr>
                  <td>
<pre>
#!/path/to/perl
##
##  lb.pl -- load balancing script
##

$| = 1;

$name   = "www";     # the hostname base
$first  = 1;         # the first server (not 0 here, because 0 is myself) 
$last   = 5;         # the last server in the round-robin
$domain = "foo.dom"; # the domainname

$cnt = 0;
while (&lt;STDIN&gt;) {
    $cnt = (($cnt+1) % ($last+1-$first));
    $server = sprintf("%s%d.%s", $name, $cnt+$first, $domain);
    print "http://$server/$_";
}

##EOF##
</pre>
                  </td>
                </tr>
              </table>

              <p>A last notice: Why is this useful? Seems like
              <code>www0.foo.com</code> still is overloaded? The
              answer is yes, it is overloaded, but with plain proxy
              throughput requests, only! All SSI, CGI, ePerl, etc.
              processing is completely done on the other machines.
              This is the essential point.</p>
            </li>

            <li>
              <strong>Hardware/TCP Round-Robin</strong> 

              <p>There is a hardware solution available, too. Cisco
              has a beast called LocalDirector which does a load
              balancing at the TCP/IP level. Actually this is some
              sort of a circuit level gateway in front of a
              webcluster. If you have enough money and really need
              a solution with high performance, use this one.</p>
            </li>
          </ol>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>New MIME-type, New Service</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          On the net there are a lot of nifty CGI programs. But
          their usage is usually boring, so a lot of webmaster
          don't use them. Even Apache's Action handler feature for
          MIME-types is only appropriate when the CGI programs
          don't need special URLs (actually PATH_INFO and
          QUERY_STRINGS) as their input. First, let us configure a
          new file type with extension <code>.scgi</code> (for
          secure CGI) which will be processed by the popular
          <code>cgiwrap</code> program. The problem here is that
          for instance we use a Homogeneous URL Layout (see above)
          a file inside the user homedirs has the URL
          <code>/u/user/foo/bar.scgi</code>. But
          <code>cgiwrap</code> needs the URL in the form
          <code>/~user/foo/bar.scgi/</code>. The following rule
          solves the problem: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteRule ^/[uge]/<strong>([^/]+)</strong>/\.www/(.+)\.scgi(.*) ...
... /internal/cgi/user/cgiwrap/~<strong>$1</strong>/$2.scgi$3  [NS,<strong>T=application/x-http-cgi</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>Or assume we have some more nifty programs:
          <code>wwwlog</code> (which displays the
          <code>access.log</code> for a URL subtree and
          <code>wwwidx</code> (which runs Glimpse on a URL
          subtree). We have to provide the URL area to these
          programs so they know on which area they have to act on.
          But usually this ugly, because they are all the times
          still requested from that areas, i.e. typically we would
          run the <code>swwidx</code> program from within
          <code>/u/user/foo/</code> via hyperlink to</p>
<pre>
/internal/cgi/user/swwidx?i=/u/user/foo/
</pre>

          <p>which is ugly. Because we have to hard-code
          <strong>both</strong> the location of the area
          <strong>and</strong> the location of the CGI inside the
          hyperlink. When we have to reorganise or area, we spend a
          lot of time changing the various hyperlinks.</p>
        </dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          The solution here is to provide a special new URL format
          which automatically leads to the proper CGI invocation.
          We configure the following: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteRule   ^/([uge])/([^/]+)(/?.*)/\*  /internal/cgi/user/wwwidx?i=/$1/$2$3/
RewriteRule   ^/([uge])/([^/]+)(/?.*):log /internal/cgi/user/wwwlog?f=/$1/$2$3
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>Now the hyperlink to search at
          <code>/u/user/foo/</code> reads only</p>
<pre>
HREF="*"
</pre>

          <p>which internally gets automatically transformed to</p>
<pre>
/internal/cgi/user/wwwidx?i=/u/user/foo/
</pre>

          <p>The same approach leads to an invocation for the
          access log CGI program when the hyperlink
          <code>:log</code> gets used.</p>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>From Static to Dynamic</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>How can we transform a static page
        <code>foo.html</code> into a dynamic variant
        <code>foo.cgi</code> in a seamless way, i.e. without notice
        by the browser/user.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We just rewrite the URL to the CGI-script and force the
          correct MIME-type so it gets really run as a CGI-script.
          This way a request to <code>/~quux/foo.html</code>
          internally leads to the invokation of
          <code>/~quux/foo.cgi</code>. 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteBase    /~quux/
RewriteRule    ^foo\.<strong>html</strong>$  foo.<strong>cgi</strong>  [T=<strong>application/x-httpd-cgi</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>On-the-fly Content-Regeneration</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Here comes a really esoteric feature: Dynamically
        generated but statically served pages, i.e. pages should be
        delivered as pure static pages (read from the filesystem
        and just passed through), but they have to be generated
        dynamically by the webserver if missing. This way you can
        have CGI-generated pages which are statically served unless
        one (or a cronjob) removes the static contents. Then the
        contents gets refreshed.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          This is done via the following ruleset: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}   <strong>!-s</strong>
RewriteRule ^page\.<strong>html</strong>$          page.<strong>cgi</strong>   [T=application/x-httpd-cgi,L]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>Here a request to <code>page.html</code> leads to a
          internal run of a corresponding <code>page.cgi</code> if
          <code>page.html</code> is still missing or has filesize
          null. The trick here is that <code>page.cgi</code> is a
          usual CGI script which (additionally to its STDOUT)
          writes its output to the file <code>page.html</code>.
          Once it was run, the server sends out the data of
          <code>page.html</code>. When the webmaster wants to force
          a refresh the contents, he just removes
          <code>page.html</code> (usually done by a cronjob).</p>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Document With Autorefresh</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Wouldn't it be nice while creating a complex webpage if
        the webbrowser would automatically refresh the page every
        time we write a new version from within our editor?
        Impossible?</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          No! We just combine the MIME multipart feature, the
          webserver NPH feature and the URL manipulation power of
          mod_rewrite. First, we establish a new URL feature:
          Adding just <code>:refresh</code> to any URL causes this
          to be refreshed every time it gets updated on the
          filesystem. 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteRule   ^(/[uge]/[^/]+/?.*):refresh  /internal/cgi/apache/nph-refresh?f=$1
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>Now when we reference the URL</p>
<pre>
/u/foo/bar/page.html:refresh
</pre>

          <p>this leads to the internal invocation of the URL</p>
<pre>
/internal/cgi/apache/nph-refresh?f=/u/foo/bar/page.html
</pre>

          <p>The only missing part is the NPH-CGI script. Although
          one would usually say "left as an exercise to the reader"
          ;-) I will provide this, too.</p>
<pre>
#!/sw/bin/perl
##
##  nph-refresh -- NPH/CGI script for auto refreshing pages
##  Copyright (c) 1997 Ralf S. Engelschall, All Rights Reserved. 
##
$| = 1;

#   split the QUERY_STRING variable
@pairs = split(/&amp;/, $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'});
foreach $pair (@pairs) {
    ($name, $value) = split(/=/, $pair);
    $name =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;
    $name = 'QS_' . $name;
    $value =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])/pack("C", hex($1))/eg;
    eval "\$$name = \"$value\"";
}
$QS_s = 1 if ($QS_s eq '');
$QS_n = 3600 if ($QS_n eq '');
if ($QS_f eq '') {
    print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n";
    print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
    print "&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;ERROR&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;: No file given\n";
    exit(0);
}
if (! -f $QS_f) {
    print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n";
    print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
    print "&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;ERROR&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;: File $QS_f not found\n";
    exit(0);
}

sub print_http_headers_multipart_begin {
    print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n";
    $bound = "ThisRandomString12345";
    print "Content-type: multipart/x-mixed-replace;boundary=$bound\n";
    &amp;print_http_headers_multipart_next;
}

sub print_http_headers_multipart_next {
    print "\n--$bound\n";
}

sub print_http_headers_multipart_end {
    print "\n--$bound--\n";
}

sub displayhtml {
    local($buffer) = @_;
    $len = length($buffer);
    print "Content-type: text/html\n";
    print "Content-length: $len\n\n";
    print $buffer;
}

sub readfile {
    local($file) = @_;
    local(*FP, $size, $buffer, $bytes);
    ($x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $size) = stat($file);
    $size = sprintf("%d", $size);
    open(FP, "&amp;lt;$file");
    $bytes = sysread(FP, $buffer, $size);
    close(FP);
    return $buffer;
}

$buffer = &amp;readfile($QS_f);
&amp;print_http_headers_multipart_begin;
&amp;displayhtml($buffer);

sub mystat {
    local($file) = $_[0];
    local($time);

    ($x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $mtime) = stat($file);
    return $mtime;
}

$mtimeL = &amp;mystat($QS_f);
$mtime = $mtime;
for ($n = 0; $n &amp;lt; $QS_n; $n++) {
    while (1) {
        $mtime = &amp;mystat($QS_f);
        if ($mtime ne $mtimeL) {
            $mtimeL = $mtime;
            sleep(2);
            $buffer = &amp;readfile($QS_f);
            &amp;print_http_headers_multipart_next;
            &amp;displayhtml($buffer);
            sleep(5);
            $mtimeL = &amp;mystat($QS_f);
            last;
        }
        sleep($QS_s);
    }
}

&amp;print_http_headers_multipart_end;

exit(0);

##EOF##
</pre>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Mass Virtual Hosting</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>The <code>&lt;VirtualHost&gt;</code> feature of Apache
        is nice and works great when you just have a few dozens
        virtual hosts. But when you are an ISP and have hundreds of
        virtual hosts to provide this feature is not the best
        choice.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          To provide this feature we map the remote webpage or even
          the complete remote webarea to our namespace by the use
          of the <i>Proxy Throughput</i> feature (flag [P]): 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
##
##  vhost.map 
## 
www.vhost1.dom:80  /path/to/docroot/vhost1
www.vhost2.dom:80  /path/to/docroot/vhost2
     :
www.vhostN.dom:80  /path/to/docroot/vhostN
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
##
##  httpd.conf
##
    :
#   use the canonical hostname on redirects, etc.
UseCanonicalName on

    :
#   add the virtual host in front of the CLF-format
CustomLog  /path/to/access_log  "%{VHOST}e %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %&gt;s %b"
    :

#   enable the rewriting engine in the main server
RewriteEngine on

#   define two maps: one for fixing the URL and one which defines
#   the available virtual hosts with their corresponding
#   DocumentRoot.
RewriteMap    lowercase    int:tolower
RewriteMap    vhost        txt:/path/to/vhost.map

#   Now do the actual virtual host mapping
#   via a huge and complicated single rule:
#
#   1. make sure we don't map for common locations
RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/commonurl1/.*
RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/commonurl2/.*
    :
RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/commonurlN/.*
#
#   2. make sure we have a Host header, because
#      currently our approach only supports 
#      virtual hosting through this header
RewriteCond   %{HTTP_HOST}  !^$
#
#   3. lowercase the hostname
RewriteCond   ${lowercase:%{HTTP_HOST}|NONE}  ^(.+)$
#
#   4. lookup this hostname in vhost.map and
#      remember it only when it is a path 
#      (and not "NONE" from above)
RewriteCond   ${vhost:%1}  ^(/.*)$
#
#   5. finally we can map the URL to its docroot location 
#      and remember the virtual host for logging puposes
RewriteRule   ^/(.*)$   %1/$1  [E=VHOST:${lowercase:%{HTTP_HOST}}]
    : 
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h1>Access Restriction</h1>

      <h2>Blocking of Robots</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>How can we block a really annoying robot from
        retrieving pages of a specific webarea? A
        <code>/robots.txt</code> file containing entries of the
        "Robot Exclusion Protocol" is typically not enough to get
        rid of such a robot.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We use a ruleset which forbids the URLs of the webarea
          <code>/~quux/foo/arc/</code> (perhaps a very deep
          directory indexed area where the robot traversal would
          create big server load). We have to make sure that we
          forbid access only to the particular robot, i.e. just
          forbidding the host where the robot runs is not enough.
          This would block users from this host, too. We accomplish
          this by also matching the User-Agent HTTP header
          information. 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}   ^<strong>NameOfBadRobot</strong>.*      
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR}       ^<strong>123\.45\.67\.[8-9]</strong>$
RewriteRule ^<strong>/~quux/foo/arc/</strong>.+   -   [<strong>F</strong>]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Blocked Inline-Images</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Assume we have under http://www.quux-corp.de/~quux/
        some pages with inlined GIF graphics. These graphics are
        nice, so others directly incorporate them via hyperlinks to
        their pages. We don't like this practice because it adds
        useless traffic to our server.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          While we cannot 100% protect the images from inclusion,
          we can at least restrict the cases where the browser
          sends a HTTP Referer header. 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} <strong>!^$</strong>                                  
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.quux-corp.de/~quux/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule <strong>.*\.gif$</strong>        -                                    [F]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}         !^$                                  
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}         !.*/foo-with-gif\.html$
RewriteRule <strong>^inlined-in-foo\.gif$</strong>   -                        [F]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Host Deny</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>How can we forbid a list of externally configured hosts
        from using our server?</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          For Apache &gt;= 1.3b6: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap    hosts-deny  txt:/path/to/hosts.deny
RewriteCond   ${hosts-deny:%{REMOTE_HOST}|NOT-FOUND} !=NOT-FOUND [OR]
RewriteCond   ${hosts-deny:%{REMOTE_ADDR}|NOT-FOUND} !=NOT-FOUND
RewriteRule   ^/.*  -  [F]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>For Apache &lt;= 1.3b6:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap    hosts-deny  txt:/path/to/hosts.deny
RewriteRule   ^/(.*)$ ${hosts-deny:%{REMOTE_HOST}|NOT-FOUND}/$1
RewriteRule   !^NOT-FOUND/.* - [F]
RewriteRule   ^NOT-FOUND/(.*)$ ${hosts-deny:%{REMOTE_ADDR}|NOT-FOUND}/$1 
RewriteRule   !^NOT-FOUND/.* - [F]
RewriteRule   ^NOT-FOUND/(.*)$ /$1
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
##
##  hosts.deny 
##
##  ATTENTION! This is a map, not a list, even when we treat it as such.
##             mod_rewrite parses it for key/value pairs, so at least a
##             dummy value "-" must be present for each entry.
##

193.102.180.41 -
bsdti1.sdm.de  -
192.76.162.40  -
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>URL-Restricted Proxy</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>How can we restrict the proxy to allow access to a
        configurable set of internet sites only? The site list is
        extracted from a prepared bookmarks file.</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We first have to make sure mod_rewrite is below(!)
          mod_proxy in the <code>Configuration</code> file when
          compiling the Apache webserver (or in the
          <code>AddModule</code> list of <code>httpd.conf</code> in
          the case of dynamically loaded modules), as it must get
          called <em>_before_</em> mod_proxy. 

          <p>For simplicity, we generate the site list as a
          textfile map (but see the <a
          href="../mod/mod_rewrite.html#RewriteMap">mod_rewrite
          documentation</a> for a conversion script to DBM format).
          A typical Netscape bookmarks file can be converted to a
          list of sites with a shell script like this:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
#!/bin/sh
cat ${1:-~/.netscape/bookmarks.html} |
tr -d '\015' | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | grep href=\" |
sed -e '/href="file:/d;' -e '/href="news:/d;' \
    -e 's|^.*href="[^:]*://\([^:/"]*\).*$|\1 OK|;' \
    -e '/href="/s|^.*href="\([^:/"]*\).*$|\1 OK|;' |
sort -u
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>We redirect the resulting output into a text file
          called <code>goodsites.txt</code>. It now looks similar
          to this:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
www.apache.org OK
xml.apache.org OK
jakarta.apache.org OK
perl.apache.org OK
...
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>We reference this site file within the configuration
          for the <code>VirtualHost</code> which is responsible for
          serving as a proxy (often not port 80, but 81, 8080 or
          8008).</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
&lt;VirtualHost *:8008&gt;
  ...
  RewriteEngine   On
  # Either use the (plaintext) allow list from goodsites.txt
  RewriteMap      ProxyAllow   txt:/usr/local/apache/conf/goodsites.txt
  # Or, for faster access, convert it to a DBM database:
  #RewriteMap     ProxyAllow   dbm:/usr/local/apache/conf/goodsites
  # Match lowercased hostnames
  RewriteMap      lowercase    int:tolower
  # Here we go:
  # 1) first lowercase the site name and strip off a :port suffix
  RewriteCond  ${lowercase:%{HTTP_HOST}}    ^([^:]*).*$
  # 2) next look it up in the map file.
  #    "%1" refers to the previous regex.
  #    If the result is "OK", proxy access is granted.
  RewriteCond  ${ProxyAllow:%1|DENY}        !^OK$          [NC]
  # 3) Disallow proxy requests if the site was _not_ tagged "OK":
  RewriteRule  ^proxy:                      -              [F]
  ...
&lt;/VirtualHost&gt;
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Proxy Deny</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>How can we forbid a certain host or even a user of a
        special host from using the Apache proxy?</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We first have to make sure mod_rewrite is below(!)
          mod_proxy in the <code>Configuration</code> file when
          compiling the Apache webserver. This way it gets called
          <em>_before_</em> mod_proxy. Then we configure the
          following for a host-dependend deny... 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} <strong>^badhost\.mydomain\.com$</strong> 
RewriteRule !^http://[^/.]\.mydomain.com.*  - [F]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>...and this one for a user@host-dependend deny:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_IDENT}@%{REMOTE_HOST}  <strong>^badguy@badhost\.mydomain\.com$</strong>
RewriteRule !^http://[^/.]\.mydomain.com.*  - [F]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Special Authentication Variant</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>Sometimes a very special authentication is needed, for
        instance a authentication which checks for a set of
        explicitly configured users. Only these should receive
        access and without explicit prompting (which would occur
        when using the Basic Auth via mod_access).</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          We use a list of rewrite conditions to exclude all except
          our friends: 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_IDENT}@%{REMOTE_HOST} <strong>!^friend1@client1.quux-corp\.com$</strong> 
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_IDENT}@%{REMOTE_HOST} <strong>!^friend2</strong>@client2.quux-corp\.com$ 
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_IDENT}@%{REMOTE_HOST} <strong>!^friend3</strong>@client3.quux-corp\.com$ 
RewriteRule ^/~quux/only-for-friends/      -                                 [F]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h2>Referer-based Deflector</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>How can we program a flexible URL Deflector which acts
        on the "Referer" HTTP header and can be configured with as
        many referring pages as we like?</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          Use the following really tricky ruleset... 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteMap  deflector txt:/path/to/deflector.map

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !=""
RewriteCond ${deflector:%{HTTP_REFERER}} ^-$
RewriteRule ^.* %{HTTP_REFERER} [R,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !=""
RewriteCond ${deflector:%{HTTP_REFERER}|NOT-FOUND} !=NOT-FOUND
RewriteRule ^.* ${deflector:%{HTTP_REFERER}} [R,L]
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>... in conjunction with a corresponding rewrite
          map:</p>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
##
##  deflector.map
##

http://www.badguys.com/bad/index.html    -
http://www.badguys.com/bad/index2.html   -
http://www.badguys.com/bad/index3.html   http://somewhere.com/
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>This automatically redirects the request back to the
          referring page (when "-" is used as the value in the map)
          or to a specific URL (when an URL is specified in the map
          as the second argument).</p>
        </dd>
      </dl>

      <h1>Other</h1>

      <h2>External Rewriting Engine</h2>

      <dl>
        <dt><strong>Description:</strong></dt>

        <dd>A FAQ: How can we solve the FOO/BAR/QUUX/etc. problem?
        There seems no solution by the use of mod_rewrite...</dd>

        <dt><strong>Solution:</strong></dt>

        <dd>
          Use an external rewrite map, i.e. a program which acts
          like a rewrite map. It is run once on startup of Apache
          receives the requested URLs on STDIN and has to put the
          resulting (usually rewritten) URL on STDOUT (same
          order!). 

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap    quux-map       <strong>prg:</strong>/path/to/map.quux.pl
RewriteRule   ^/~quux/(.*)$  /~quux/<strong>${quux-map:$1}</strong>
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <table bgcolor="#E0E5F5" border="0" cellspacing="0"
          cellpadding="5">
            <tr>
              <td>
<pre>
#!/path/to/perl

#   disable buffered I/O which would lead 
#   to deadloops for the Apache server
$| = 1;

#   read URLs one per line from stdin and
#   generate substitution URL on stdout
while (&lt;&gt;) {
    s|^foo/|bar/|;
    print $_;
}
</pre>
              </td>
            </tr>
          </table>

          <p>This is a demonstration-only example and just rewrites
          all URLs <code>/~quux/foo/...</code> to
          <code>/~quux/bar/...</code>. Actually you can program
          whatever you like. But notice that while such maps can be
          <strong>used</strong> also by an average user, only the
          system administrator can <strong>define</strong> it.</p>
        </dd>
      </dl>
      <!--#include virtual="footer.html" -->
    </blockquote>
  </body>
</html>