Today I needed to rewrite a list of about 1000 URL’s to a new location. Our product database was cleaned and new URL’s were created… Using RewriteMap from Apache’s Mod_rewrite comes in handy here.
In my case I needed to rewrite URL’s like this:
www.exampledomain.com/en/product1234/product_detail.php
to
www.exampledomain.com/en/travelbox_12/product_detail.php
Where in my URL’s I had a 1000 different ‘poducts1234’ to rewrite to a new URL.
Here’s the HOWTO:
Create a textfile on your server with 2 columns. Something that would look like this:
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product1234 travelbox_34 product1235 travelbox_13 product2310 case_07 product3126 case_12 product9320 anotheritem_54 .... .... |
And save it to a folder you wish, eg
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vim /etc/apache2/conf.d/productrewrites.txt |
from this file, create a rewrite database, more info: httxt2dbm
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httxt2dbm -f db -i /etc/apache2/conf.d/productrewrites.txt -o /etc/apache2/conf.d/productrewrites.db |
Once done, open your vhosts config and add the following configuration:
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RewriteEngine On RewriteMap rewrites dbm=db:/etc/apache2/conf.d/productrewrites.db RewriteCond {rewrites:$1} !="" RewriteRule ^/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ http://www.exampledomain.com/(.*)/${rewrites:$1}/$2? [R=permanent,L] |
A bit of clarification:
The line with content:
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RewriteCond {rewrites:$1} !="" |
creates a condition that if the rewritemap contains the URI and the value is not “” (so an empty string) then it should perform the RewriteRule.
The rewrite rule itself is pretty obvious. It’ll rewrite the URL’s for which the rewritemap is found to the new product URL, and also keep the trailing parameters.