Mod_rewrite on Evan Hoffman

Putting up a "down for maintenance" message using mod_rewrite

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:11:42 +0000

Putting this here for safekeeping so my future self can find it. Mod_rewrite is one of my favorite tools, but it’s easy to spend 30 minutes crafting a 2-line directive that actually does what you want. I put this in a .htaccess file in the DocumentRoot of the server, put a “We’re down” message in maintenance.html (or whatever), and all requests will get a 302 redirect to /maintenance.html, except requests for /maintenance.html (for obvious reasons). It appends the original request in case you want to do something with it but that’s not really important. It also doesn’t do the redirect for images/js/css so those can actually be used in the maintenance message.

Putting up a "down for maintenance" message using mod_rewrite

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:11:42 +0000

Forcing Wordpress administration over SSL

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:46:05 +0000

I never like typing a password into a non-SSL site, no matter how trivial it is. In order to give my own site this ability I simply used mod_rewrite to force requests to Wordpress’s admin pages to go over SSL.

The .htaccess file for the site looks like this:

BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /evan/ RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /evan/index.php [L]