Is mod_rewrite necessary?

Administration
1

We are moving our in-office Gibbon server to a more permanent home on a hosted server, and at the same time creating another Gibbon server for a college with whom we cooperate heavily. Both the new hosted installations installed Gibbon with Softaculous. As I compare the Home > System Admin > System Check page with our existing in-office server, I notice mod_rewrite is not installed and the APACHE MODULES section does not even appear. Will this cause problems if not corrected or is the mod_rewrite module no longer required and Softaculous correctly installed everything we need?

Thanks for your help!

2

Hi Glenn,

Sounds like some big changes afoot. @ross might correct me on this, but from memory, whilst mod-rewrite is used in Gibbon, you’ll most likely not notice if it is not enabled. However, it does provide some protection to some files that you might not want people to access (e.g. database structure), and so it is useful to have. These same documents are available elsewhere and not very sensitive, as Gibbon is open source, but this makes it a little hard for students to find them.

My aim would be to get all of the required modules set up. Interesting that they are not all showing in Softaculous. Can you share a screenshot of what you are seeing?

Thanks,

Ross

3

The page on the left is the new Softaculous install at our hosting provider. The one on the right is the existing server in our office that will be replaced. The Softaculous install used MariaDB instead of MySQL, and had all the Gibbon DB tables set to InnoDB but the default for any other tables created would be MyISAM. So, if I add any additional modules, I think I’ll have to change their database files type after install. Otherwise, Softaculous installed everything much faster than I put the original in-office server together without it!

Ross, thanks for your explanation above. – Glenn

4

Hi Glenn,

That is very interesting. Perhaps on a shared hosting server, the Apache modules cannot be checked.

@ross are you able to shed any light on this?

Thanks,

Ross

5

Mod_rewrite is enabled on cpanel, but your host may not have it enabled. I would just contact them. If you have shell / command line access this is handy to check if it is and how to enable. BUt check with your host first.
https://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-to-enable-modrewrite-for-apache-web.html

6

Thanks Ross and Alex! That was my plan after I found out from Ross or Sandra if I really needed to enable it or it was an older, outdated requirement. After hearing Ross’s explanation of the security implications, I definitely want to enable it! (I’m also looking forward reading Sandra’s insights, as well.)

7

Hi! Yep, it’s good to have mod_rewrite enabled, not just for now but also for the future. One of our development goals in the next few versions is to move to using a modern PHP routing system, which uses mod_rewrite to send all requests to the index page and then route them to controllers from there.

8

THANKS! You folks are always helpful.