Okay, I am using CodeIgniter which likes to use URL rewrites. I can turn it off, but don't want to. I was able to deny direct access to index.php and at one point I was able to have the URL rewrite accept index.php/non-url/but/url-looking-data which it passed to index.php

My problem is that I have no idea what I am doing, I am just copying examples and thus I got one working, but when I tried the other I lost the first fix.

Let my start simple (for my sake) I see that one person said that all rewrites should be done at the server level instead of the location level... verification of this? Is that true?

What does !-e $request_filename due?

Why is it better than try_files (which I saw one person use) ?


Exactly what I am trying to do is hide index.php in the URL, but still send all url requests to index.php WITH the full url so that CodeIgniter can disect the url and get the paramaters for index.php to process.

Any help is appreciated. I will try to get better questions as I learn about this.