Clean URLs

Removing index.php from your urls.

To keep your URLs clean, you will probably want to be able to access your app without having /index.php/ in the URL. There are two steps to remove index.php from the URL.

1. Edit the bootstrap file
2. Set up rewriting

1. Configure Bootstrap

The first thing you will need to change is the index_file setting of [Kohana::init] to false:

Kohana::init(array(
    'base_url'   => '/myapp/',
    'index_file' => FALSE,
));

This change will make it so all of the links generated using [URL::site], [URL::base], and [HTML::anchor] will no longer include “index.php” in the URL. All generated links will start with /myapp/ instead of /myapp/index.php/.

2. URL Rewriting

Enabling rewriting is done differently, depending on your web server.

Rewriting will make it so urls will be passed to index.php.

Apache

Rename example.htaccess to only .htaccess and alter the RewriteBase line to match the base_url setting from your [Kohana::init]

RewriteBase /myapp/

The rest of the .htaccess file rewrites all requests through index.php, unless the file exists on the server (so your css, images, favicon, etc. are still loaded like normal). In most cases, you are done!

404 errors

If you get a “404 Not Found” error when trying to view a page then it’s likely Apache is not configured to read the .htaccess file.

In the main apache configuration file (usually httpd.conf), or in the virtual server configuration file, check that the AccessFileName directive is set to .htaccess and the AllowOverride directive is set to All.

	AccessFileName .htaccess

	<Directory "/var/www/html/myapp">
			AllowOverride All
	</Directory>

Failed!

If you get a “Internal Server Error” or “No input file specified” error, try changing:

RewriteRule ^(?:application|modules|system)\b - [F,L]

Instead, we can try a slash:

RewriteRule ^(application|modules|system)/ - [F,L]

If that doesn’t work, try changing:

RewriteRule .* index.php/$0 [PT]

To something more simple:

RewriteRule .* index.php [PT]

Still Failed!

If you are still getting errors, check to make sure that your host supports URL mod_rewrite. If you can change the Apache configuration, add these lines to the configuration, usually httpd.conf:

<Directory "/var/www/html/myapp">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

You should also check your Apache logs to see if they can shed some light on the error.

NGINX

It is hard to give examples of nginx configuration, but here is a sample for a server:

location / {
    index     index.php index.html index.htm;
    try_files $uri index.php;
}

location = index.php {
    include       fastcgi.conf;
    fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
}

If you are having issues getting this working, enable debug level logging in nginx and check the access and error logs.