Apache vhosts config RewriteCond to ignore part of URL

Applications Web Development
1

I am attempting to control redirections on my site using the Apache vhosts config.

I have two-letter regions setup, such as /fr, /de, /es, which I am currently ignoring as you will see from my vhosts file below. However I also have a 301 permanent redirect setup to redirect /cm (and /fr/cm, /es/cm etc) to another page - this is controlled in my back-end system.

The complication is when I add the line

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/cm

this is caught by the RewriteCond, however I then cannot access /fr, /de, /es etc at all as they seem to get stuck in a loop and go to: AyrshireMinis.com is for sale | HugeDomains and then it HTTP 500 Internal Server Errors.

How could I change the RewriteCond to allow for:

/pa (this will be redirected to /minis, but it is controlled in the database and needs to stay as a valid URL)
/fr (the region)
/fr/pa
/es/pa
etc.

    # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    # REGION SPECIFIC REDIRECTIONS
    # Below will remove region specific part of URL and load content from main UK site
    # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    RewriteCond             %{REQUEST_URI}                  ^/([a-z]{2})$                   [OR]
    RewriteCond             %{REQUEST_URI}                  ^/([a-z]{2}/)(.*)$
    RewriteCond             %{REQUEST_URI}                  !^/cm
    RewriteRule             ^([a-z]{2}/|[a-z]{2})(.*)$      /$2                                             [L,QSA]

    # For VirtualDocumentRoot development instance configurations
    RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ /index.php?url=$1 [L,QSA]
2

Rewrites are not redirections. Rewrites are rewrites -- the web server sees one URL, the client another.

If you want to do actual redirects which divert the client somewhere else, I'd use the redirect directive. This would appear to involve less messing around with regexes, too.

Redirect permanent /ca/ http://full.path.to/url/
3

Thanks. However, I have the RewriteCond's setup (which work well) to ignore the region part of the URL when loading content. Basically, all i'm looking to do is ignore the /pa from the detection of two-letter region detection.

Is this possible without having to re-write large parts of my vhosts config?

4

These look like country codes. Could you specify all valid country codes except the one to be excluded, instead of excluding the one you don't want?

^/(fr|de|es|...)/