I have a SPA app with dynamic content for sharing on Facebook so I am redirecting Facebook crawlers to a nice static page using the following rule in htaccess:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^facebookexternalhit.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://sharing.mysite.tld/api/share/$1 [L]
This works great! But there is one problem… I can’t make my app live because Facebook requires a link to privacy policy, terms and conditions etc – and these get redirected too!!
I need to ignore a certain URLs – anything requested in /docs/ – from the above rule EDIT: so that urls containing /docs/ are followed as normal (no redirect, just served normally). I can’t get .htaccess to pick up on the ignore rule. I would have thought this would do it (with thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/a/1848579/4881971):
RewriteRule ^(docs)($|/) - [L]
so I would have thought my .htaccess file would look like this :
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^facebookexternalhit.*$
RewriteRule ^(docs)($|/) - [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://sharing.mysite.tld/api/share/$1 [L]
but when I use Facebook Object Debugger on https://mysite.tld/docs/privacy I get a 404! It redirecting to https://sharing.mysite.tld/api/share/docs/privacy
How do I retain the rule but ignore requests from mysite.tld/docs/* ? Thanks.
2
Answers
Could you please try following, please make sure you clear your browser cache before testing your URLs. This considers your uri starts from
docs
.In case you want to pass URLs where docs could come anywhere in uri(not from starting what 1st solution looks for), then try following Rules.
Have it like this with a negated comdition: