Using Web Server Rewrites

Magento can use more human looking and search engine friendly addresses for it's pages if you switch on 'Use Web Server Rewrites'. This relies on two things.

  1. Apache's mod_rewrite module. All our servers have this installed and enabled.
  2. A .htaccess file in the same folder as your Magento install. Magento comes with a .htaccess file for you to use that should work as is.

If you switch on 'Use Web Server Rewrites' and get 404 errors then check that the .htaccess file is installed.

Some FTP programs may not show .htaccess files or upload them without switching on an option to show 'hidden' files. On UNIX based operating systems, files beginning with a period such as .htaccess are not shown in listings with the usual ls command. You can view them on the command line with 'ls -a' to show all files.

  • 12 Users Found This Useful
Was this answer helpful?

Related Articles

Installing Magento

We've installed it for a number of clients on our 'dingo' server which has all the system...

Emails not being sent from Magento

If you're not receiving emails from Magento - eg. from the 'Forgotten your password' link in the...

Magento Connect Downloader gives Internal Server Error

There's a bug in Magento's downloader which sets the file permissions to files it has installed...

Magento v1.1 says pdo_mysql not installed

Please delete the php.ini that gets installed with v1.1. This overrides the system php.ini which...

Menu not working in admin

There's a long standing bug in Magento that means the pull down menus may not work in admin....