How to Implement URL Routing in PHP

Question

How to implement URL Routing in PHP.

Answer 1

If you use Apache you can do the URL routing via mod_rewrite.

Small example:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(dir1)/?(path2)? main.php?dir=$1&path=$2

That'll have any request like

http://yoursite.com/dir1/path1 

served by

http://yoursite.com/main.php?dir=dir1&path=path2

More examples here.

The other alternative have every request redirect to a single php file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) main.php?request=$1

and then to do it in code, where you can use a similar approach, by having a set of regular expressions that are matched by some code and then redirected via header() or just internally.

Answer 2

First of all, you will need Apache's (I suppose your webserver is Apache) mod_rewrite to be enabled.

Then, you need to create a RewriteRule to redirect everything to your index.php page.
Something like this could do :

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule .* index.php 

It will redirect every request to a file that doesn't exist to index.php ; this means that, if the requested URL is www.example.com/blah, it is actually index.php that will be called.

About that, here a couple of link that can help :

• URL Rewriting Guide
• mod_rewrite: A Beginner's Guide to URL Rewriting

Then, this page has to determine what has to be displayed, depending on what initial URL was called -- or what parameters are received.

This can be done using the Design Pattern Front Controller, for instance -- it's implemented in most modern PHP Frameworks, for instance.

There have been many questions of this subject on SO ; some of those (and their answers) might probably help you. For instance :

• How do I do URL rewriting in php?
• URL mapping in PHP?
• PHP Application URL Routing