Mod_rewrite is on but not working

Question

I read for a while, and I can't get this to work.

mod_rewrite is included in Apache and I changed AllowOverride to everything

My .htaccess looks like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.+)$ profile.php/?username=$1 [L] 

and my default file for apache2 looks like this: ServerAdmin webmaster @localhost

  DocumentRoot /var/www <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all </Directory> <Directory /var/www/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride all Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. LogLevel warn CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined 

error.log

 [Sat May 25 20:13:21 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by$ [Sat May 25 20:13:21 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by$ [Sat May 25 20:13:22 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by$ [Sat May 25 20:13:23 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by$ [Sat May 25 20:14:56 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbf', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not$ [Sat May 25 20:14:57 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbf', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not$ [Sat May 25 20:14:59 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbf', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not$ [Sat May 25 20:14:59 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbf', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not$ [Sat May 25 20:15:04 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by$ [Sat May 25 20:15:04 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by$ [Sat May 25 20:15:20 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by$ [Sat May 25 20:15:20 2013] [alert] [client (ip)] /var/www/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by$ [Sat May 25 20:15:58 2013] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down 

On my website, I get an internal internal server error message. Please, help!

Answer 1

Try changing your code to this:

 Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews # Turn mod_rewrite on RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.+)$ profile.php/?username=$1 [L] 

i.e. disable the MultiViews options.

PS: Looking at your error.log, it looks like you have special characters in your .htaccess before RewriteEngine .