The web developer’s holy vhost trinity

When you’re developing web stuff, working with projects in path names (i.e. not at the top level of a domain) can be difficult (gets in the way of absolute links, rewrite rules etc), so you often need to set up a local apache virtual host, stick an entry in DNS and create an SSL certificate before you can get on with the serious business of doing some real work. This can get to be a drag when you do it a lot, but there is an extremely elegant solution that means you’ll never have to do it again…
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Apache mod_rewrite bug still lurks

There’s this enormous apache mod_rewrite bug that I ran into back in 2005, and to my dismay, it’s still there. Long-standing bugs are usually small edge cases that don’t affect many people, but this one is a monster that I suspects pretty much everyone that’s using mod_rewrite, and they’ve just been lucky in avoiding it. The basic issue is this: if you match params that require URL encoding to be safe, mod_rewrite will not rewrite the back-reference (that’s $1 below) correctly. So take this very simple redirect:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?show=$1 [R]

so you hit http://www.example.com/a%2Fb and mod_rewrite neatly rewrites it as http://www.example.com/index.php?show=a/b! Notice that it has urldecoded the matched parameter in the replacement string.

Apache 2.2 introduced a new B flag to deal with this, but that apparently suffers the same problem! There are two workarounds I’ve used that are both horrible: double-encode the source string (if you are in control of both start and end points of the URLs) to survive the spurious urldecode, or base-64 encode (javascript flavour) it and do the decoding yourself. I did warn you they were horrible.

I’ll bet that there are a zillion mod_rewrites out there that suffer from this fundamental problem and haven’t even noticed. If a few people voted for this to be fixed, it would probably go away…