Gotcha Of The Day: SSL website ignoring .htaccess file

I needed to put quick Apache RewriteRule fix in place on a website, so I decided to add the rules to the .htaccess file. For the life of me, I couldn't get the rules to take effect.

After much poking around, I realized that the rules were being observed for the http version of the site, but the https version was ignoring them.

After still more digging, I could find plenty of folks talking about how to limit rules to just non-https pages, but I couldn't find anyone suggesting that SSL version of the .htaccess file would normally be ignored.

Then it hit me - the VirtualHost definition for the SSL site is a totally separate configuration than the non-SSL site. And that was the key, I had:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName something.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/something
    ...
    <Directory /var/www/vhosts/something>
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName something.com:443
    DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/something
    ...
</VirtualHost>

I had an AllowOverride clause in the non-SSL virtual host, but not in the SSL version. The result: the non-SSL version was observing the .htaccess file, the SSL version was ignoring it.

I added that clause in to the SSL version, restarted the server, and I was good to go.