How to generate friendly URLs with .htaccess
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Ok, now you have your own game portal. Let’s call it triqui.com.
You want to share a link with your friends, or want search engine to index it properly.
If I want you to play Jamag, I have to give you this link
http://www.triqui.com/play.php?id=1713.
Now, I would like you to tell me how can you understand I am talking about Jamag from this link http://www.triqui.com/play.php?id=1713.
You can’t.
Now let’s understand why I have to write that play.php?id=xxxx to play a game.
All information about the games is stored in a database, and every game has an unique id assigned by the script.
Jamag’s id is 1713, so when I pass this value, the php script knows where to retrieve information about the game.
If you want to play Jamag on Kongregate, this is the link:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/triqui/jamag.
Seems like Kongregate has a directory to store my games (triqui) and a subdirectory for every game I made.
Obviously that’s not true. This is possible thanks to…
.htaccess file
Normally .htaccess is used to implement custom error pages or password protected directories. But you can do a lot more with this file.
First, let me point that .htaccess is the file extension, not the filename. The filename does not exists.
That’s what I created with my favourite text editor (notepad…)
1 2 3 | ErrorDocument 404 /index.php RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^id/([^/\.]+)/?$ /play.php?id=$1 [L] |
Let’s see what is it:
Line 1: ErrorDocument detects any document error. If you don’t know what I am talking about, here it is a brief list:
401: Unauthorized – The request requires user authentication.
403: Forbidden – The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it.
404: Not Found – The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI.
So ErrorDocument 404 refers to a “not found” error… that happens when the user looks for a page that does not exist
/index.php is the path where to redirect the user if he requested a page that does not exist
We can say that ErrorDocument 404 /index.php means “if someone requested a page that does not exist, then redirect him to index.php”.
And that’s what happens: go to http://www.triqui.com/dfgretre (a page that does not exist) and you will be redirected to home page.
Just in one line of code…
Line 2: Activation of the RewriteEngine module, a rewriting engine to rewrite requested URLs on the fly.
Not all servers support the rewrite engine.
In order to determine if your server supports it, you have to upload a php file with just:
1 2 3 | <?php phpinfo(); ?> |
and see what happens. In the result page, search for “mod_rewrite”.
If you find it in the “Apache loaded modules” section, then you know your server supports the rewrite engine, although in a server with php version 4.4.7 I was able to make it work even if the search returned a negative result.
Line 3: The core instruction: RewriteRule looks if the current URL matches with the regular expression passed as first parameter.
That ^id/([^/\.]+)/?$ is a regular expression, and even if I am planning to make a tutorial about regular expressions (reg exps from now on), at the moment I am just recommending you this Wikipedia article.
The second parameter of RewriteRule is the substitution.
Basically this instruction says: if the page starts with id (^id/) then copy everything that’s not a slash, a backslash or a period (([^/\.]+)) and make sure that after the starting matched id there is only a slash (/?$)… then load the page /play.php?id=$1, pasting the characters previously copied in place of $1.
The final [L] tells not to search for any more rule if this one was satisfied.
In an even basic way, the script says:
If you find an URL like
http://www.triqui.com/id/1713/
just redirect to URL
http://www.triqui.com/play.php?id=1713
And that’s what happens if you go to http://www.triqui.com/id/1713/.
I hust had to upload that .htaccess file in my root directory.
You may say there is not a big difference between play.php?id=1713 and /id/1713/ but this is the first step to friendly URLs generation.
Stay tuned for the next update.















(10 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5)









This post has 13 comments
RipeX
Really awesome! :D
Robin
Oh god, thank you. Really been looking for this :D
Shawn
You describe this stuff in such a great and simple way that I have no problem following along and I’m not a programmer. I can’t wait for the update! Thanks again for a great tutorial!
CrociDB
Very good tutorial! Thank you! :)
Livesinabox
I was working on this very thing the other day for mochi publisher – probably using the slug field. I think it’s unlikely to make much of a difference to the player. This is usually whats called search engine friendy urls for dynamic content sites. I doubt any player will type in your game url directly, but it will look a bit better when you place a link that is just a url rather than a description (but then i think it’s always better to provide a descriptive text name instead of just the address and looks better). However, how much difference it actually make with regards to rankings i don’t know, i guess that would depend on the name of the game and the keywords used.
How to generate friendly URLs with .htaccess - part 2 : Emanuele Feronato - italian geek and PROgrammer
[...] you read part 1, you should know how to have a friendly url to play a game in your Flash game [...]
Robin
Hm, it says ‘server made a boo boo’. What’s wrong?
Neghina Cristi
Very good , very good tutorial.
Really been looking for this.
10x.
Klas
Nice but i wonder how you do like this
http://www.triqui.com/id/1713-text
please
Zigmas
Hey, I was wondering, why all my images go out after I write anything after slash/ ?
I only can write http://www.triqui.com/id and if i do
http://www.triqui.com/id/something all images just goes out :/
Anonymous
Would this code work? It’s supposed to turn http://www.example.com/games/publisher/thegame into http://www.example.com/play.php?name=thegame&creator=publisher.
<codeErrorDocument 404 /index.php
RewriteEnging on
RewriteRule ^games/([^/\.]+)/([^/\.])/?$ /play.php?name=$1?creator=$2 [L]
Anonymous
Sorry, the last post was messed up.
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
RewriteEnging on
RewriteRule ^games/([^/\.]+)/([^/\.])/?$ /play.php?name=$1?creator=$2 [L]
superposts
it did not work for me :(