Friendly URLs
Enable professional looking URLs
Enabling friendly URLs
You may notice that your URLs look a bit ugly with /index.php/ in every path by default.
This URL doesn’t look very professional:
This looks much nicer:
Ironically, the default URLs are ugly because Cerb’s underlying design is secure and elegant. Every URL in Cerb is virtual – there isn’t a corresponding file on the webserver for each link. Every page request routes through the index.php script, and all asynchronous requests are routed through ajax.php. Those two scripts are the only entry points into all of Cerb’s functionality.
Cerb supports URL rewriting to make the URLs shorter and more user-friendly. This isn’t enabled by default because it requires your webserver to support it.
Enabling friendly URLs with Nginx
This is all you should need to do to enable friendly URLs in Nginx:
cd /path/to/cerb
touch .htaccess
You can alternatively edit the framework.config.php file and manually set DEVBLOCKS_REWRITE to true.
Enabling friendly URLs with Apache
If you’re using the Apache web server you can enable URL rewriting with the following commands:
cd /path/to/cerb
cp .htaccess-dist .htaccess
For this to work you will need to enable mod_rewrite in your Apache configuration. It is usually already enabled.
If mod_rewrite isn’t enabled, you can use the following commands on many Linux-based servers:
sudo a2enmod rewrite
service apache2 reload
If these commands don’t work, you’ll need to enable the module manually.
Enabling friendly URLs with IIS
Install URL Rewrite 2.1 from the Web Platform Installer (WPI).
Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
Click on the Cerb web site.
Double click on the URL Rewrite icon.
Click Add Rule(s)… in the right sidebar.
Double click Blank Rule:
- Name: Friendly URLs
- Requested URL: Matches the pattern
- Using: Regular Expressions
- Pattern: ^(.*)
- Conditions: {REQUEST_FILENAME} ‘is not a file’
- Rewrite URL: /index.php/{R:1}
Click Apply in the right sidebar.
In the directory where you installed Cerb (e.g. C:\inetpub\wwwroot\cerb\), create an empty .htaccess file.