The following block is what it’s all about. It seems to have it’s origin on WebmasterWorld and Rob Russel’s Blog and looks basically like this:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !vardump
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1?vardump&reqhost=%{HTTP_HOST} [R=301,L,QSA]

Pretty easy and quite nice. The first line just prevents recursion, so that you’ll be able to see the first redirect and nothing else. The second line is where you can place in every information you’d like to check. The [R=301,L,QSA] makes sure that you can debug without interruption. The “R=301″ makes sure the browser doesn’t start a second request, but tells him that the location was changed, the “QSA” makes sure that the querystring isn’t lost and the “L” prevents that your server performs other redirection rules.

As shown the first block already unveils some information and places it into the redirection URL, so you could use it to check what the value of HTTP_HOST is and you also know whether mod_rewrite works or not. This way you can debug every variable mod_rewrite offers and you can check environmental variables and results of the regular expressions.

If you’d like to know whether a specific RewriteCond is working or not just place it in that block and you’ll see if it’s still redirecting or not, like this (via):

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !vardump
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^de.*$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1?vardump&languageMatchedDE [R=301,L,QSA]

Checking a regular expression from an RewriteCond looks like this (used on a server with a pretty strange setup for %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}):

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !vardump
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} ^(.*\/htdocs\/).*$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1?vardump&reqfilename=%1 [R=301,L,QSA]

As you see that’s a pretty handy way to debug lot’s of mod_rewrite stuff, it helped me quite often and I hope it does the same for you

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