How to Enable Apache mod_rewrite Module in Ubuntu

Posted on by Seemab Saleem

In this tutorial, we will show you how to manage URL rewrites using Apache2’s mod_rewrite module. When we installed a fresh Apache server mod_rewrite is not enabled by default on server, So to use rewrite configurations we need to manually enable mode_rewrite module on our system.This is a most basic way to enable mod_rewrite. 

Enabling mod_rewrite

To enable mod_rewrite module in our Apache setup,we use following command:

a2enmod rewrite

And restart the Apache:

service apache2 restart

Setting Up .htaccess

Using .htaccess file we can modify our rewrite rules without accessing server configuration files. That’s why, .htaccess is critical for our web application’s security.

First, to allow changes in the .htaccess file. Open the default Apache configuration file using  your favorite text editor.

nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf

Into that file, Search for “DocumentRoot /var/www/html” and add the following lines directly below:

<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

To put these changes into effect, restart Apache again.

service apache2 restart

Now create the .htaccess file:

nano /var/www/html/.htaccess

Add the following line at the top of newly created file to enable RewriteEngine.

RewriteEngine on

Save and exit the file.

To make sure that other users can only read your .htaccess , run the following command to update permissions:

chmod 644 /var/www/html/.htaccess

Now to check if mod_rewrite is installed correctly, check your phpinfo() output.