Kiki URL Rewrites With Managed Hosting

Saturday April 26th, 2025

Tags: blog, kiki, meta, tech

Just a quick note about URL redirects with kiki: the user guide gives some steps for enabling URL rewriting (under the heading "SEO-Friendly Permalinks") for use with the "easy" style of permalinks. For example, instead of example.com/index.php?page=blog, it's much cleaner to simply have example.com/blog.) I figure most people using kiki would prefer this setup, if possible.

The steps in the documentation assume you're running your own apache server¹ and have access to the configuration, but with a managed hosting provider (such as mine) the process is different. It took some figuring out, but here's what worked for me:

Create a file in your root folder called .htaccess. It should be a text file with only the following lines:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?page=$1 [L,QSA]

Here's what each line does:

RewriteEngine on enables the URL rewriting feature.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d says this rule only applies to anything that isn't an existing folder name.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f says this rule only applies to anything that isn't an existing file name.

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?page=$1 [L,QSA] is what does the rewriting. ^(.*)$ is what's know as a "wildcard expression".² It ensures that the rule applies to whatever the visitor types after the .com/.³ the $1 is a reference tag. It refers to whatever appears in the first (in this case only) set of parentheses. So if a visitor types example.com/whatever, as long as "whatever" isn't an existing file or folder name, that it'll display as if the person instead visited example.com/index.php?page=whatever. Importantly, this doesn't forward the visitor, it actually changes the URL. That's the difference between a rewrite and a redirect; I confused the terminology in a previous draft, sorry about that.

[L,QSA] is part of the Apache rule. L means "last", i.e. "stop after you process this rule." QSA is a flag that allows the rule to work with queries, i.e. anything after the ? in the URL.⁴

Big thanks to RaVBaker for helping me piece this together, particularly his extended example. This stuff is tricky and most of the tutorials out there do not explain things well.

The solution may be different for you depending on your hosting provider, but hopefully this will point you in the right direction.

Like 👍️ Share 📣 Reply 💌