Edit .htaccess with PHP

Question

I have a .htaccess that maps a domain to a folder.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# redirect mapped domain
ReWriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} joshblease.uk.to
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !gme-index/
ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ gme-index/$1 [L]

Is there any way to edit/add extra domain maps to the file using PHP?

Simply, I want to get the contents of the .htaccess file and add to them using a PHP script.

Answer 1

As suggested in one of the comments above it is better to use RewriteMap for your case here rather than trying to edit .htaccess from PHP code directly. Here is a sample how to use it:

1. Add following line to your httpd.conf file:

   RewriteMap domainMap txt://path/to/domain-dir.txt
   

2. Create a text file as /path/to/domain-dir.txt like this:

   sub1 /subdir1
   sub2 /foodir2
   foo /bar
   

3. Add these line in your .htaccess file:

   Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)\.domain\.com$ [NC]
   RewriteRule ^$ ${domainMap:%1} [L,R]
   

Effectively all this means is to have these redirects in place:

• sub1.domain.com/ => sub1.domain.com/subdir1
• sub2.domain.com/ => sub2.domain.com/foodir2
• foo.domain.com/ => foo.domain.com/bar

Advantage: With this setup in place, you can edit or recreate the file /path/to/domain-dir.txt as much as you want from your php code without opening a huge security hole be allowing php code o edit .htaccess directly.