[newbie] Making sense of a .htaccess

Hello

When working on my laptop, I'd like to use a lighter alternative to
Apache that is Abyss X1 to write web apps using the Code Igniter PHP
framework. Problem is, to present clean URLs, Code Igniter uses
mod_rewrite and .htaccess... which Abyss doesn't support.

I googled for information on mod_rewrite, but I'm stuck with the
second condition below :-/

So I need to understand what the .htaccess sample given in the Code
Igniter documentation means before trying to rewrite it to work with
Abyss' URL Rewriting module.

Here's the .htaccess that works when I upload the app on a shared host
that runs Apache:

----------
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ index.php [L]
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|assets|search)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
----------

1. Does the first line mean that if the URL is empty for that part of
the URL (eg. http://localhost/igniter/), it should append index.php
(to turn into http://localhost/igniter/index.php)?

2. In the RewriteCond line, what does $1 stand for? I haven't found
information on this type of variable. Is it somehow related to a $1
reference in regexes?

Thanks!

On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 08:58:47 +0100, Davide Bianchi
<davideyeahsure@onlyforfun.net> wrote:
>> 2. In the RewriteCond line, what does $1 stand for?
>
>The bits in the parenthesis in the url, so basically the whole URL.

OK. So Apache first saves the stuff between brackets into $1, and then
performs the test.

Thanks!