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difference between ^/(.*) and ^(.*) and .* in the Apache RewriteRule Pattern

As far as I know, they are all the same.
But I wonder why people use the rex in the RewriteRule Pattern.

Does ^ have any performance benefits?

RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]

Does / have any performance benefits?

RewriteRule /(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]

Does () have any benefits?

RewriteRule (.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]

Thanks.

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    Does ^ have any performance benefits?

    Yes, the regex will only apply to the begining of the url so it will be faster

    Does / have any performance benefits?

    Not really, it just matches a slash character

    Does () have any benefits?

    In regex the parenthesis create a group to capture substrings

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  2. 0

    There are few more things to keep in mind here (in addition to the other answer):

    1. This rule, as it is (alone, without any other rewrites or conditions), should probably be written as

       Redirect / https://example.com/

      In this case, the rewrite engine will not be involved which might result in
      (probably negligible) performance benefit.

    2. If you have a reason to use %{SERVER_NAME}, keep in mind that %{SERVER_NAME} might have different value than you expect, if UseCanonicalName is set to a non-default value. %{HTTP_HOST} should be safer.

    3. Even if you have to use RewriteRules (or RewriteCond), there is no need to use regex to capture full request URI, it is already available in %{REQUEST_URI}, so this should be faster:

      RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

    4. Keep in mind that RewriteRule behaves differently when use used in .htaccess compared to .conf:

      In per-directory context (Directory or .htaccess), the Pattern is
      matched against only a partial path: the directory path where the rule
      is defined is stripped from the path before comparison – up to and
      including a trailing slash!. The removed prefix always ends with a
      slash, meaning the matching occurs against a string which never has a
      leading slash.

      Or to put it more clearly: in .htaccess, there is no leading /.( just a reminder: you should not use .htaccess at all if you have access to Apache configuration files)

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