apache mod rewrite - how to determine what file on disk is being hit?

Question

A project that I am newly working on has been around for years, and it has managed to accumulate several hundred rather complex RewriteRules within the Apache conf files.

When working with some files, I have been able to figure out which rules affect them. However, in other cases I am completely stuck at figuring it out. My method so far has been to manually look through the various conf files, and grep them for certain keywords.

Is there a better way to do this?

Some of the things which I can think of are:

• Is there a command or REPL where I can enter a path, and it return that name of the file that it serves?
• Is there a tool that will let you do the above, and also highlight which lines in the conf files re-wrote that rule?
• Is there a way to inspect the log files to determine what the input path and corresponding file served path were?

... but I am not sure where to begin with any of these.

Answer 1

Please enable the RewriteLog directive that Paul mentioned above. Then set the value of the RewriteLogLevel directive to 2.

After that start to increase the value of RewrireLogLevel up to 9 until you see the necessary details recorded to the log file.

Answer 2

agree with above, to enable rewrite log, simply add

RewriteLog <file-path>
RewriteLogLevel 2

to your virtualhost file, then restart apache

the man file for mod rewrite can be found here