Debugging

Summary

The RewriteLog is going to be your most useful tool when attempting to troubleshoot your rewrite rule sets. As you become more familiar with regular expression syntax, the most common cause of confusion in mod_rewrite is the difference between rewrite expressions in the main configuration file versus those in .htaccess files.

Setting up a test server on a machine that you completely control, such as your desktop computer, is an almost essential part of really learning mod_rewrite, since if you’re not the server administrator, there’s really no way to effectively use the RewriteLog. Once you have your rules working correctly on the test server, you can move them to the production server and be assured that they will work correctly there.