htaccess Rewrite question: file renaming

[frankvh]

Ah!

Thank you. Point well taken. So this doesn't work too well in practice for index files, because unless you specifically type in the index.html extension (and who does that?? I just type cnn.com when I want cnn for example) then it doesn't work.

OK, thank you, that makes sense. So this is not the right path to be going down.

I think I'm going to experiment with a cron job.

[frankvh]

So as we'd expect, a cron job does the trick. Perhaps not the most elegant, but it works. The cron job copies index.html to index.php. Then in .htaccess, just to be safe, I put this:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

simply to be extra-sure that the php file would be used in preference to the html file.

I used the -u parameter for cp (ie: cp -u index.html index.php) just to prevent unnecessary overwrites of the php file.

[NiteWave]

I tested

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule index.html - [T=application/x-httpd-php]

as well. it works.

another way I tried working is to create a hard link(not soft symbol link):

ln index.html index.php

with this method cron job not needed.

[frankvh]

Yes, sort-of. I tried your suggestion:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule index.html - [T=application/x-httpd-php]

It does indeed work if I do this:
http://frankandcolleen.mydomain.com/index.html

But not if I do this (which unfortunately is the normal way of doing it)
http://frankandcolleen.mydomain.com

I'm not sure why the server makes a distinction between these two cases, but it obviously does.


Your hard link idea

ln index.html index.php

is a great idea - I'll do that. As you point out, then the cron job isn't needed anymore.

[mistwang]

add another rewrite rule

RewriteRule ^$ index.html

above