mod_rewrite / CentOS 5

[paul]

I have CentOS 5 VPS and I want to enable mod_rewrite. I'm sure this is something that alot of people want to do. But I seem to be getting some conflicting responses, and none of them work.

So I have a VPS, 2 IP addresses, 1 is shared, the other 1 is domain specific. Some of the liturature I've read said that I need to do this for every vhost, but I would like to enable this automatically.

apache is showing the module loaded (via phpinfo)
apache2handler : Loaded Modules

core prefork http_core mod_so mod_auth_basic mod_auth_digest mod_authn_file mod_authn_alias mod_authn_anon mod_authn_dbm mod_authn_default mod_authz_host mod_authz_user mod_authz_owner mod_authz_groupfile mod_authz_dbm mod_authz_default util_ldap mod_authnz_ldap mod_include mod_log_config mod_logio mod_env mod_ext_filter mod_mime_magic mod_expires mod_deflate mod_headers mod_usertrack mod_setenvif mod_mime mod_dav mod_status mod_autoindex mod_info mod_dav_fs mod_vhost_alias mod_negotiation mod_dir mod_actions mod_speling mod_userdir mod_alias mod_rewrite mod_proxy mod_proxy_balancer mod_proxy_ftp mod_proxy_http mod_proxy_connect mod_cache mod_suexec mod_disk_cache mod_file_cache mod_mem_cache mod_cgi mod_version mod_perl mod_php5 mod_proxy_ajp mod_python mod_ssl

Any tips on what is the right way to enable mod_rewrite for all my domains (the ones on the shared IP and the IP specific one) ?

Any help would be welcomed !

[blacknight]

Is this a Plesk vps or not?

If it's a Plesk vps mod_rewrite is already loaded (or should be)

[paul]

It is a PLESK VPS.

when I add a basic .htaccess file I start to get 500 server errors

PHP Code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
#Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on


# index.php to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET /.*/index.(php|html) HTTP
RewriteRule (.*)index.(php|html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]

# force www.
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^en.org [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.en.org/$1 [r=301,nc]
</IfModule> 


[paul]

it seems like there were a few characters somehow being added to the start of the file



to be exact.

Well that's 3 hours of my life I will never get back !

[blacknight]

I'm not sure if this is affecting you, but I've seen oddities when DOS line endings get into files. You can convert the files using "dos2unix" which might help ...