Magento 1.8 – Enabling Rewrites with XAMPP and BitNami

configuration

I am running XAMPP 1.8.3 + bitnami installation of Magento 1.8.0.0 on Windows 7.
I would like to get rid of index.php in the URLs I see. Here is the rest of my setup:

1) I have entered a dummy host name for my local testing environment in
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
so that it contains the following line and restarted Apache:

127.0.0.1   localhost   myhost.com

2) I have secured my XAMPP installation by following the setup found at
http://myhost.com/security/index.php

3) I have had a look at C:\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf
and the line that loads the Apache Rewrite module is already uncommented
and the htdocs directory under C:\xampp already has .htaccess files
enabled as follows (comments deleted):

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

<Directory "C:/xampp/htdocs">
  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
  AllowOverride All
  Require all granted </Directory>
</Directory>
  1. I have enabled Rewrites in the Admin panel

Magento Admin Panel -> System -> Configuration -> Default Config
-> GENERAL -> Web -> Search Engine Optimization -> Use Web Server Rewrites -> Yes

  1. The various XAMPP .htaccess files for my Magento installation using bitnami now point to the following file:

C:\xampp\apps\magento\conf\htaccess.conf

which contains the following Apache directives:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule .* index.php [L]
</IfModule>

which are the ones advertised on other posts on Stack Overflow.

However when from my main page I click on a category I get a 404

because for instance the page http://myhost.com/magento/mycategory.html

is not found (although http://myhost.com/magento/index.php/mycategory.html is found).

What am I missing from my configuration to get mod_rewrite to work as wanted?

Thanks.

Best Answer

I've found the answer to my problem.

When I installed Magento via BitNami I specified a base directory of "magento" meaning my magento files were installed to C:\xampp\magento. Because of this, to get rewrites working as needed and get rid of index.php, I was missing the last step which is, inside of C:\xampp\apps\magento\conf\htaccess.conf I still had to uncomment the following line, inside the 

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

directive:

#RewriteBase /magento/

to

RewriteBase /magento/

This was all that was left. I uncommented the line and restarted Apache and my URLs such as http://myhost.com/magento/mycategory.html began to work.

Thanks.