What does this this HTTP Authorization RewriteRule do?

.htaccess mod-rewrite url-rewriting apache2 googlebot
The Surrican picture The Surrican · Feb 9, 2011 · Viewed 43.5k times · Source

I have an rewrite recursion error somewhere on my website that Google Bot caused, but I can't find the url that caused it because my Loglevel is low. I raised it but it has not happened again so far.

RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]

All Rewriterules look fine to me and have the [L] flag, except this one.

I can't quite understand it. It is from the open source shop system Magento.

As far as I can tell it does nothing but sets the environment variable E. But isn't that a very stupid way of doing that? Shouldn't you use SetEnv if that was the goal?

Answer

Etienne Marais picture Etienne Marais · Nov 7, 2012

Symfony developers Group has a good answer for it. I quote:

it looks like your hosting is running php as a fcgi, not a php5_module, like your localhost does. ( phpinfo - Server API: CGI/FastCGI )

the point is that php5_module automatically handles HTTP_AUTHORIZATION headers, but fcgi_module does not.

solution is simple - add this line to your .htacces on your hosting server:

RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

It worked for me

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