ExpressionEngine 404 Not found - /index.php/products was not found

Question

I have just begun working with ExpressionEngine. The production site is working just fine and I wanted to create a local version for dev purposes.

I am receiving 404 not found errors on my localhost pages such as localhost:8888/example.com/products or localhost:8888/example.com/aboutus, but the index or home page comes up just fine - localhost:8888/example.com/

I have followed the steps for migration from this link - http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/operations/moving.html

1) Downloaded flat files via ftp 2) Used a backup .sql to load the local mysql 3) Able to login to system - localhost:8888/dev.example.com/system - all usernames & passwords work 4) Setup all the URLs within Admin> General Configuration - so on and so forth

I was able to fix my template synch issue by going into the Design> Templates> Global Preferences and change the path to the templates' path on my computer - they were still set to the template’s path in production.

/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/dev.example.com/templates

Both the localhost:8888/example.com/system and the initial index page - localhost:8888/example.com/ - function exactly as they would be expected to do.

I have created an htaccess file and placed it within /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/dev.example.com/:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /

    # Removes index.php from ExpressionEngine URLs
    RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/system/.* [NC]
    RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,NE,L]

    # Directs all EE web requests through the site index file
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

But I am still receiving a 404 not found error whenever I try to go to localhost:8888/example.com/products then it thinks that /index.php/products was not found, why does it not say products/index.php?

BTW, is the path to the templates supposed to be this: /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/dev.genesistoday.com/templates

or this: /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/dev.genesistoday.com/templates/default_site/

Answer 1

If you are running from localhost:8888, then locally you are essentially running these sites from subdirectories. So the .htaccess you are using (RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]) is sending requests to http://localhost:8888/index.php.

Try the second exception from the user guide:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

Notice there is no / in front of the index.php. You will also want to remove the RewriteBase / otherwise it will prepend that to your rules, which you don't want in this case.