About 3 months ago, I was trying to get WP to run my whole site – but still allow access to existing pages. This seemed easy, using the new features of WP2.1 but I couldn’t seem to get the right apache magic. Recently, a few other people have had similar issues (check out WP support forums) and finally the last bits of the puzzle fell into place. It’s a mix of working with the chroot magic on OpenBSD and also correct settings for WP itself. The recipe follows: I have a symlink from /var/www/htdocs/wordpress back to the original /var/www/wordpress directory that I sync regularly from the subversion repository.

Create /var/www/htdocs/.htaccess with following content:

    # BEGIN WordPress
    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /wordpress/
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php
    </IfModule>
    # END WordPress

And then ensure permissions are sorted out appropriately:

    chown root:daemon /var/www/htdocs/.htaccess
    chmod 0644 /var/www/htdocs/.htaccess

But that’s still not quite enough to have it run under OpenBSD’s chroot. By default, the permissions placed on /var/www/htdocs by httpd.conf prevent WP from performing the rewrite magic, specifically disabling file tests. The way Apache knows whether to direct pages to WP or to the file you asked for is simple - if a file or directory exists with the name you asked for, it will be served up; if nothing exists then your request gets handed over to WP first. So, here are the changes needed to /var/www/conf/httpd.conf:

    # This controls which options the .htaccess files in directories can
    # override. Can also be "All", or any combination of "Options", "FileInfo",
    # "AuthConfig", and "Limit"
    #
    # AllowOverride None
    AllowOverride FileInfo

And then you can set up where you want your blog to appear under WP options menu as usual.