Adding an .htaccess Rule to Make Simpler Links to Drupal Files

Mark Jarrell's picture
Submitted by Mark Jarrell on Mon, 12/28/2009 - 21:48

In a site I was recently working on, I found myself hard-coding links to files stored within my Drupal site's "files" directory. If you've ever coded these links before, you know that they normally look something like:
/sites/[sitename]/files/[someotherdirectory]/image.jpg

This can be somewhat painful to add to the site, especially if you have any plans to ever change the domain name of your site. It would really be ideal if you could leave the domain name out of the equation and just write the link in the format:
/files/[someotherdirectory]/image.jpg

This is actually possible to do using the .htaccess file that appears in the root of your Drupal installation. Basically you just need to add a single line:
RewriteRule ^files/(.*)$ /sites/%{HTTP_HOST}/files/$1 [L]

After you implement this rule, you should be able to start writing simpler links to your "files" directory.

Happy coding!

Image of the rewrite rule and the alternate links. See PDF on DIWD Site.

P.S. - Giving credit where credit is due, I actually first heard about this tip from a presentation by James Van Dyke at the 2008 Do It With Drupal conference in New Orleans.

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Tue, 02/02/2010 - 05:15 — oktavita (not verified)

Thanks for sharing

I've been using .htaccess for quite a while, but when I change it, I got error internal recursion on apache logs, is there a way to stop this? Thank you very much.

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 02:18 — drupal consultants (not verified)

Thanks for your bright

Thanks for your bright idea!
It will surely help me a lot....

Sat, 01/02/2010 - 01:59 — kerja keras adalah energi kita (not verified)

thanks

thank you for sharing and cheers

Fri, 01/01/2010 - 14:26 — dalin (not verified)

or, if you aren't doing

or, if you aren't doing multisite, with a new site you can just use /files from the beginning.

Wed, 12/30/2009 - 02:10 — Stuart Clark (not verified)

_

You might also consider the File Aliases module (http://drupal.org/project/file_aliases), it allows you to define aliases to the file anywhere you want (/files/, /node/[nid]/files, etc) without the need of modifying your .htaccess file.

Tue, 12/29/2009 - 08:03 — José Fernandes (not verified)

Thank you so much!!! I was

Thank you so much!!!

I was migrating from a multi-site installation and add millions of files indexed on Google that where changing there URL because of that. Very bad for SEO. This magically solved my problem :-)

Thanks!!!

José FErnandes

Tue, 12/29/2009 - 07:02 — Jonathan Brown (not verified)

You can also use

You can also use http://drupal.org/project/pathfilter