URL on apache server does not default to the .php file after / has been added

Generally a url that looks like this: http://www.domain.com/product.php/12/

will open up product.php and serve the /12/ as request parameters, which then my PHP script can process to pull out the right product info. However when I migrated this whole site, after developing开发者_运维技巧 it, to a new server, I get a 404 error, because on that server it's not defaulting to the mother directory/file in case of an absence of requested directories.

I vaguely remember learning that this is generally a common apache function but I can't seem to recall how to set it up or how to manipulate it.. if there's an .htaccess method to achieve this that would be great.

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What you're referring to is mod_rewrite. The official docs for it are here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html

You would configure it either in your VHost definition (recommended) or in an .htaccess file.

Assuming that you want to map all requests to a resource that Apache cannot serve (such as files that don't exist) to products.php you can use the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /products.php?request=$1 [NC,L]

You can then use $_GET['request'] to get the path requested and take it from there, depending on what you want to do. I'd normally recommend letting mod_rewrite handle parsing the request and passing the proper attributes to your PHP, but if you're not familiar with mod_rewrite it's probably easier to do it in your PHP.

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you can use mod rewrite engine to map this to

http://www.domain.com/product.php?arg=12

Mod rewrite details: http://forum.modrewrite.com

Sample:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^files/([^/]+)/(.+) files.php?app=$1&file=$2 [NC]

this rewrite rule will map any request containing files/firstrPart/secondpart to the script files.php

everything between the first and second slash after files will be passed as parameter app and the rest as file

Basicly you define a regex with some subpaterns and state which script should really be called.

You cna refer to the subpatterns with $n where n is the 1 based index of the pattern.

Have fun.

NOTE this is a extreme simplification of mod rewrite. Please do some research before you use it because this might go terribly wrong...

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The directive you're looking for is "AcceptPathInfo on". mod_negotiations MultiViews feature would also give you the option of not including the ".php" which is another common one people abuse mod_rewrite to do.