Hide /public from Slim or Mini2 framework with .htaccess (and a bugfix)

UPDATE:

Aug-1-2016

From B7th:

After trying to find workaround solutions, I found this to work perfectly fine and without having to deal with too many things:

`./.htaccess`

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/$1 [L]

`./public/.htaccess`

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|robots\.txt|favicon\.ico)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ../index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

Your index.php is to be kept outside the public/ folder, is needed if you are not at the root, and links do not need a starting slash.

OLD:

I was recently playing around with Mini2 – “An extremely simple PHP barebone / skeleton application built on top of the wonderful Slim router / micro framework.” I love how minimal and easy-to-learn the framework is.

Maybe for the first time I’m able to understand the whole MVC (model-view-controller) concept. However, I ran into a small problem when trying to make my app run on a subfolder.

Because I was still experimenting and hunting for a framework, I’d put eveything I find in a phptests subfolder on localhost.

My root URL looks like http://localhost/phptest/mini2/ and in order to run it, I’d navigate to http://localhost/phptests/mini2/public/.

Well, that works fine but I didn’t like that public folder and wanted to access my app by going to just the root – /mini2.

After a day of trying different VirutalHost and .htaccess solutions, I found out that the problem was in Slim itself.

The following is the solution that worked  for me:

C:/xampp/htdocs/phptests/mini2/.htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/$1 [L]

C:/xampp/htdocs/phptests/mini2/public/.htaccess (it’s the default)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [QSA,L]

C:/xampp5/htdocs/phptests/mini2/vendor/slim/slim/Slim/Environment.php

Open the following file and look for “Virual path” (in my case line 143) Replace the first line (or comment it out) with the first line below:

// Virtual path
//(You can remove this line) $env['PATH_INFO'] = substr_replace($requestUri, '', 0, strlen($physicalPath)); // <-- Remove physical path 
$env['PATH_INFO'] = str_replace(str_replace('/public', "", dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])), '', "/".$requestUri); //removes '/public'
$env['PATH_INFO'] = str_replace('?' . $queryString, '', $env['PATH_INFO']); // <-- Remove query string
$env['PATH_INFO'] = '/' . ltrim($env['PATH_INFO'], '/'); // <-- Ensure leading slash

If you've done eveything correctly you should be able to access your slim or mini2 app by going to it's root folder. In my case localhost/phptests/mini2

But we're not done yet. :(

Because Slim and Twig uses slash "/" in front of all URLs it would always return to http://localhost.

That's why it's probably best to use absolute paths, based on a predeifned variable. 

I added a base variable to the view object and the app - here's what I have in my index.php - (change starts from line 15 to the end)

base = $base;
$app->hook('slim.before', function () use($app) 
{ 
$app->view->setData(array('base' => $app->base)); 
});

 After that you'll have to edit all your view files (.twig) to use the base variable like this: 

Before: 

MINI2




home
subpage
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{% block content %} {% endblock %}