.htaccess issues: No input file specified

Question

Can someone help me with this? I'm feeling like I've been hitting my head against a wall for over 2 hrs now.

I've got Apache 2.2.8 + PHP 5.2.6 installed on my machine and the .htaccess with the code below works fine, no errors.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|css|gfx|js|swf|robots\.txt|favicon\.ico)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

The same code on my hosting provider server gives me a 404 error code and outputs only: No input file specified. index.php is there. I know they have Apache installed (cannot find version info anywhere) and they're running PHP v5.2.8.

I'm on Windows XP 64-bit, they're running some Linux with PHP in CGI/FastCGI mode. Can anyone suggest what could be the problem?

PS. if that's important that's for CodeIgniter to work with friendly URLs.

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Update1:

mod_rewrite is installed and on.

What I've noticed is that if I change in RewriteRule to /index.php?$1 (question mark instead of forward slash) it goes into an infinite loop. Anyway, using question mark isn't an option as CodeIgniter (required) is not going to work this way.

Homepage also works when I request index.php directly: example.com/index.php

I'm starting to think it might be apache thinking that once the trailing slash is added it is not a file anymore but a folder. how to change such a behaviour?

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Update 2:

I was wrong.
Apache handles these URLs correctly.
Requesting http://example.com/index.php/start/ (homepage) or any other valid address works.
Seems that Apache is just not forwarding the query for some reason.

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Update 3:

Just to be clear what I'm trying to achieve.
I want to rewrite addresses like that:

http://www.example.com/something/ => http://www.example.com/index.php/something/ http://www.example.com/something/else/ => http://www.example.com/index.php/something/else/

Answer 1

I was beating my head up against this as well. I'm also installing Code Igniter.

The goocher was no RewriteBase. Here's my .htaccess:

DirectoryIndex index.php

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|robots\.txt)

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]