Apache catchall vhost

As mentioned in one of my recent posts, I occasionally have to setup catchall pages in Apache. The general idea is usually that I either want a vhost that serves one page for any conceivable request, or that I moved something and want to alert the visitor, but provide a formula-based link to the new content. Assuming you have mod_rewrite, this is relatively simple.

In your vhost configuration (or .htaccess), you just need two lines:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/index\.php$1
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php$1 [L]

This will redirect every request for the vhost to /index.php. Within your PHP script, you can access the actual request URI through $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]. The script that I’m currently using for an internal page is:

$newServer = "http://foo.example.com:12345";

if($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] == "/" || $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] == "/index.php")
  {
    header("Location: ".$newServer);
  }
else
  {
    $newURL = $newServer.$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
    echo '<html><head><title>Page Moved</title>';
    echo '<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="5;URL='.$newURL.'">';
    echo '</head><body>';
    echo '<p>The page you are looking for is best found at:</p>';
    echo '<p><strong><a href="'.$newURL.'">'.$newURL.'</a></strong></p>';
    echo '<p>You will be automatically redirected after 5 seconds. If this does not happen, click the link above.</p>';
    echo '</body></html>';
  }

This script takes two distinct actions:

If the requested path is / or /index.php, it transparently redirects to a different URL (and port).
Otherwise, it displays a “page moved to” message and uses a Meta-Refresh to redirect after 5 seconds.

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