Lithium Problem on Rackspace

Today I came across a situation where I was deploying a PHP-based webapp written in Lithium and running on a Rackspace cloud site. In my scenario, I noticed 2 symptoms (appearing differently, but having the same cause).

1. if the Lithium app is a subdirectory of another webapp (in my example, the main site is WordPress), you will always get a WordPress “Oops! The page you are looking for does not exist.” error.
2. if the Lithium app is in the root, you will get an “Internal Server Error” page.

As it turns out, the problem is the .htaccess file included with Lithium.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the .htaccess per se, but under Rackspace you seem to have to include the “RewriteBase” directive.

So, as a result, you must edit all 3 .htaccess files in your Lithium project thus:

• /.htaccess – RewriteBase /
• /app/.htaccess – RewriteBase /app/
• /app/webroot/.htaccess – RewriteBase /app/webroot/

If your webapp is a subdirectory, this subdirectory name will need to prepended to RewriteBase path:

• /.htaccess – RewriteBase /subdir/
• /app/.htaccess – RewriteBase /subdir/app/
• /app/webroot/.htaccess – RewriteBase /subdir/app/webroot/

And presto, it now magically works!