Enabling mod_rewrite and fixing some custom permalinks’ issues, warned on also by some plugins.
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Many times trying to make your permalinks more friendly to SEO, or after you migrated your site to a new host or changed your domain, you face issues with your settings for permalinks. Some plugins related to changing permalinks also warns you about issues like mod_rewrite is required, or .htaccess issues. The .htaccess is a distributed configuration file, and is how Apache handles configuration changes on a per-directory basis. See more at: https://wordpress.org/support/article/htaccess/.
Indeed, when you change your permalinks, you have to have the module mod_rewrite of your Apache server enabled.
Check if the module mod_rewrite is enabled
If you work on a local machine this is not a big deal. Create a .php file, e.g. name it php-info.php, put just the following line inside it:
<?php phpinfo();?>
And then go to your browser and check it:
http://localhost/php-info.php
Actually, search for the mod_rewrite:
In the above case, the mod_rewrite module is not present. So we have to enable (install) it.
Enable the mod_rewrite module
Usually enabling a module can be done using the a2enmod command:
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
a2enmod is a well-known command to enable an Apache module, and we usually use it to enable a specific Apache module. However, a2enmod is written for a Debian distribution (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) and it is a Debian-specific script for the Apache server package.
In a macOS system, we can achieve the same thing by editing the Apache main configuration file /usr/local/etc/httpd/httpd.conf and uncommenting the line for the rewrite module:
LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so
Then restart Apache server:
➜ ~ apachectl restart
After that check again that the module is enabled:
As you can see above, the module is sown enabled.
Now your site’s custom permalinks, as well as plugins requiring mod_rewrite, should work OK!
NB: In a Synology NAS server the Apache main configuration file is located at:
/var/packages/Apache2.4/target/usr/local/etc/apache24/conf/ httpd24.conf. So, you can search inside it and check if:LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
is enabled (uncommented). If no, uncommend it, accordingly.
That’s it!
Thank you for reading!
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