htaccess seems to be overwritten during installation?

[JCB-K]

I ran into this issue because Hostgator requires a line in .htaccess to enable PHP 5.3. When I filled in my details and submitted the setup form it warned me that Anchor needs PHP 5.3. When I checked the htaccess it was completely empty. By pasting in the original line for PHP 5.3 and the Anchor Rewrite rules I got it to work again.

Just realised this also meant that I skipped creating an admin user...

[saltandvinegarcrisps]

What would you suggest?

When a user selects clean urls the installer copies the htaccess.txt contents to the .htaccess file with the rewrite base if anchor is installed in a subfolder.

[JCB-K]

Not sure if this is possible, but maybe use FILE-APPEND, so it just adds it to the existing file? I've done this locally, and it manages to write the htaccess in a clean manner, but the installer still gets stuck. I'll let you know about any progress.

[saltandvinegarcrisps]

I think the best option is to leave the existing htaccess file and the user will have to manually update it to enable clean urls. We cant append and assume its safe to do so.

[JCB-K]

Read a bit up on it, and the general consensus seems to be that web apps should never edit the .htaccess for exactly that reason. The thing is, by not automating it you're adding another step to the install process. But potentially breaking someone's server setup is not worth eliminating that step.

Maybe let it only write the .htaccess when it doesn't exist yet (as in the dev branch right now), and otherwise give a warning along the lines of:

"It seems like you've already got a htaccess file. Paste this text at the end of your file to setup clean url's."

[saltandvinegarcrisps]

I agree. Updated in dev branch.