Thread

Before purchasing EE, I thought it would be smart to use the Server Compatibility Wizard on my localhost environment and two external hosting environments I use. The results show everything works except Url Segment Support. Without this feature, as I understand it I’d be stuck with ugly urls throughout my EE sites. Which isn’t ideal of course, so I’m looking for any information to activate this feature.

From what I’ve read elsewhere, URL Segment Support needs to be activated in the .htaccess file or the server configuration. On localhost I have access to httpd.conf and php.ini, so I’d really like to know if there is anything I can do to get support for this feature going, before I choose to buy.

I’ve tried adding this to my httpd.conf:

AcceptPathInfo On
Options +FollowSymLinks

Which doesn’t seem to have any effect. Any pointers would be very much appreciated. I’m not a server / hosting expert by the way, but I have some basic knowledge of it. Thanks in advance!

Hi geertvdheide,

Thank you for your interest in ExpressionEngine and welcome to the Forums!

Good idea to run the Wizard. Lots of folks use ExpressionEngine on servers that don’t meet that point.

What I need to know to best offer advice is, what server platform do plan on using?

Usually that point is missed on Windows IIS.

Let me know and we’ll get you some advice. You can also email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to qualify for an Evaluation License.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Cheers,

Thanks for your reply Dan. I’m planning on using Apache, and this is also the platform I’ve run the wizard on. I’ve tried it on my localhost which uses WAMP server 2.2, apache 2.2.21, php 5.3.9 and mysql 5.5.20. Any hosting provider I choose will also use a recent version of Apache. On my local installation I have access to all of the configuration. Do you know of any configuration settings I should add or change in order for URL segment support to work? If you need any more info, let me know 😊

And thanks for the info on an Evaluation License. I might ask for one soon, because I like what I’m seeing so far and you replying on a saturday is saying good things about the support aswell 😊

You want to make sure that AllowOverride directive is allowing you to use the needed Rewrite* directives. Also make sure that mod_rewrite is installed. This is a pretty good tutorial if you’re on Debian, but the same files should exist for WAMP. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of experience with WAMP myself, but the stuff mentioned here is what you need to check to make sure it will work.

... I like what I’m seeing so far and you replying on a saturday is saying good things about the support aswell 😊

Thank you for the kind words! Support isn’t typically staffed on the weekend, but we are dedicated to the ExpressionEngine Community, so we sneak in from time to time 😉

I’m by no means an apache/httpd.conf expert, but this works for me on my MAMP sandboxes:
httpd.conf
-
httpd-vhosts.conf

Use those to contrast your own local configs. As for hosts in the wild, and reputable hosting company works quite well with ExpressionEngine.

Let me know if there is anything else I can do.

Thanks!

Thanks for the replies. @airways: The rewrite module is installed and active, and I’ve set AllowOverride like this in my httpd.conf:

<Directory >
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
</Directory>

<Directory "c:/wamp/www/">
    Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
    AllowOverride All

#   onlineoffline tag - don't remove
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

My vhosts are also working and the whole WAMP setup seems to be doing fine (I’ve tried running Magento on it for example, which works well).

@Dan: Could it be that the Server Config Wizard is throwing a false negative here? Could you maybe run the wizard on your localhost and see if you get a red “no” next to URL Segment Support as well? Or maybe you’re using a .htaccess file somewhere to set additional configuration?

Other than that, I suppose the next step would be to just try an actual EE installation and solve any problems I encounter then.

Yeah I would just try it at this point as well. It seems fine to me. I’m sure any actuall issues you encounter will be something one of us has seen before.

Hey there geertvdheide,

I agree with airways, give it a go and we can tackle anything that comes up together!

Let us know how it goes!

Cheers,

If you are having troubles check out http://www.host-ee.com.  Very affordable hosting plans and they will install ExpressionEngine for you!

Just to get back to this slightly older topic: I’ve now purchased my first EE license and am running it locally (Windows 7, WAMP, Apache/php/mysql). I’ve had no issues with URL segment support and the removal of index.php worked perfectly. I’m yet to try it on a production environment but I’m confident that won’t be much of a problem either.

The compatibility wizard might be throwing a false negative on the URL Segment support though, at least for me. Could be something for the developers to take a look at at some point.

I’ll start a new topic if I run into any other issues while working on my first EE project. So thanks for the help guys!

Hey Geert van der Heide,

Thanks for letting us know!

If you need anything else, please just let me know by opening a new thread.

Cheers,