Using Htaccess in PHP Engine

In order to create a website engine, first you need to make sure that any URL request of the site is processed by one PHP file.

This is done using a special file .htaccess. Let's create this file and enable it by writing the following lines at the beginning of its text:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

After that, we can specify which file should process the requested URL. This is done using the RewriteRule command.

Let's look at the work of this command in practice. For example, let's make the address /test be processed by the file index.php:

RewriteRule /test index.php

The first parameter of the RewriteRule command actually takes a regular expression. Let's use it to make all URLs be processed by the file index.php:

RewriteRule .+ index.php

However, some addresses still should not be redirected. These are addresses that lead to resource files: CSS, JavaScript, images, and so on.

Let's cancel their redirection using the RewriteCond command:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(js|css|ico|jpg|png)$
RewriteRule .+ index.php

On the index.php page, we can get the requested URL using the superglobal array $_SERVER:

<?php
	$url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
?>

Create a .htaccess file. Use it to implement the redirection of all requests to index.php.

Display the requested URL on index.php.