I’d like: http://www.example.com/username

to redirect to: http://www.example.com/user.php?id=username

Trying to use this mod_rewrite rule I found: RewriteRule ^user/(\w+)/?$ user.php?id=$1

However, I have something wrong. It doesn’t work (shocker!). I’ve tried a lot of different things, but no luck. Any advice linode ninjas? Thank you!

<VirtualHost xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.:443>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias http://www.example.com

DocumentRoot /home/public

<Directory /home/public>
Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^user/(\w+)/?$ user.php?id=$1

ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(TRACE|TRACK)
RewriteRule .* - [F]
</IfModule>

</VirtualHost>

_________________
I'm completely new to the LAMP stack.

You could instead use mod_proxy and in the VirtualHost section add these two lines:

ProxyPass /
ProxyPassREverse /user.php

Then update user.php to look at the url and parse the username.

For any directories that should not be part of username processing like:

http://www.example.com/foo

You could tell Apache to pass those urls through as is with:

ProxyPass /foo !

I'll have a look at this mod_proxy and give it a try - thanks!

_________________
I'm completely new to the LAMP stack.

Your RewriteRule here expects a url that looks like: http://www.example.com/user/username, which will redirect to http://www.example.com/user.php?id=username.

If you really want to use http://www.example.com/username, then you are going to have some added complication. What if i register my username as index.php?

You're right about the incorrect rule, and I don't use Apache but I remember you could have rewrite conditions to make sure a file does NOT exist before rewriting. In that case it would just serve index.php instead of redirecting, so the user loses that functionality. To prevent this, you could just disallow dots in usernames.

Also I'd recommend a rewrite for this purpose instead of a reverse proxy.

Don't rewrite if it matches a directory:
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} -d

Or file:
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} -f