WordPress mod_rewrite rules taking over mod_status and mod_info

After moving Rule of Tech to a new server and setting up monitoring I noticed that server-status and server-info Apache modules weren’t working as expected. As usual a little bit of Googling solved this problem.

The problem was that the .htaccess rules in WordPress were taking over non-existing server-info and server-status urls given in Apache’s config and were returning a page not found error. The rewrite rules by WordPress were setup to handle all the permalinks on the site and for any non-existing file send it to index.php. It really wasn’t a WordPress problem and should happen with any application that uses the same type of catch-all rewrite rules to handle all the urls inside the application.

The solution was to specifically add a rewrite rule to not have the server-status and server-info urls processed by adding a rule like: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/server-status. The other way is to stop the rewriting process when the urls are found by adding a rule like: RewriteRule ^(server-info|server-status) - [L].

The WordPress rewrite rules should look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# server info and status
RewriteRule ^(server-info|server-status) - [L]
# RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/server-status
# /server info and status
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

# END WordPress