How to get Apache2 to parse (without error) Header directives in a .htaccess

Feel a bit silly - a bit more googling turned up the answer I was after:

RedirectMatch ^/$ /git/

Basically redirecting the root, and only the root.

This code could do in a .htaccess file (there is a tag for this, so I assume that is the original use case). But if you can edit ,the main server apache config then put it in the section for your website probably inside a <VirtualHost> section.

The docs for RedirectMatch say that the context can be "server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess".

Probably the ProxyPass / directive you have in your config routes all requests to the Tomcat backend, bypassing all your mod_rewrite directives. You can try to remove the ProxyPass directive and use RewriteRule with the [P] flag after your other rewrites:

• mod_rewrite: P|proxy

For the expire headers the situation is worse — in another similar question a solution was not found.

Option +FollowSymLinks would be needed for using mod_rewrite in .htaccess files; in your case it is not required, because you can put everything in the Apache config. Moving rules from config to .htaccess is pointless and can only make things slower. However, there is an important difference between .htaccess and the Apache config — in .htaccess patterns in RewriteRule are matched against relative filesystem paths (which never start with /), while in the VirtualHost context these patterns are matched against the URL path after the hostname, which always starts with /. Therefore at least one of your rules is incorrect:

RewriteRule ^content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

should be

RewriteRule ^/content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

(note the additional slash in the beginning).