Category: Techie

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WordPress Rewrites without .htaccess

It’s been known for many years that apache’s AllowOverride .htaccess files incur a performance hit, as every node on the path from the location hit to the document root need to be checked for .htaccess files and parsed. I’ve mostly avoided the whole issue by hosting on nginx instead, but I recently needed to host WP on Apache again and ran into this issue. Many places offer a snippet like this for rewrites from a .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^.*$ /index.php [NC,L]

This says:

  • If the request is for index.php, serve it as is.
  • If the request is for a file or folder that does not exist, serve index.php instead.
  • Implicitly, if the request is for a file or directory that does exist, serve that.

The problem is that while this will work in a .htaccess file, it won’t work in main apache config because REQUEST_FILENAME will just be a filename, not a whole path, so it’s unlikely to match. The solution to this is to prepend the document root:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^.*$ /index.php [NC,L]

This took me a silly amount of time to solve. I found the critical info in this post, but I thought I’d clarify it here. HTH!

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Getting the modulus of an SSL public key

Getting a hash of the modulus of SSL keys and certificates is a nice simple way of making sure they match.
I’ve found lots of docs that tell you how to get the modulus of a private key, CSR or certificate, but I had trouble finding how to do the same for a public key, where the PEM-encoded file begins -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----. The public key is x509, but this openssl command produces an error because it’s expecting a certificate rather than a public key:

openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in mykey.public | openssl md5
unable to load certificate
140735178354768:error:0906D06C:PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line:pem_lib.c:701:Expecting: TRUSTED CERTIFICATE
(stdin)= d41d4e9400998ecf8cd98f00b208427e

The solution is simply to tell it that it’s a public key with the -pubin switch:

openssl rsa -noout -modulus -pubin -in mykey.public | openssl md5
(stdin)= 6ab17b2db672280921e1c5fed6908187

(Hashes altered to protect the innocent!)