Problems removing index.php from development site

Question

I'm trying to set up a development site with a specific development URL. The development site is a clone of a live site, but I'm not able to get the htaccess code to work to remove index.php.I've tried all the configuration options I can find*, but nothing is working. This is the first time I've never been able to get this to work. The development server has a non www url (ie http://dev-domain.com). Could this be a problem?

<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>

*ie adding '?' to index.php, removing the first slash, changing system to the actual system name, trying the $config['uri_protocol'] options. All to no avail.

Answer 1

I have one system using a non www domain setup and I use the following to handle the index.php rewrite

#strip index.php from the URL if that is all that is given
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.php$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/
[R=301,NS,L,QSA]

#strip index.php/* from the URL
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.php/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^index\.php/(.+) http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L,QSA]

For the other web requests, your code is the same as mine, except I need to use a question mark after index.php

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

One other thing that may be worth noting, in my environment I am not using ReWriteBase / and I wonder if that could be your issue.

Answer 2

Turns out that htaccess had not been enabled in the hosting account. For the benefit of anyone else: checking the PHP settings to see if mod-rewrite was enabled was still positive even though htaccess was not enebaled. Trying to deliberately force a server error (by putting random text in the file) using htaccess to check if it was enabled did nor work either. The simple trick that worked was to use a redirect to see if htacces was working or not.