regex - Apache 2.4 - Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error

Question

I'm running Apache 2.4 (64bit) and PHP 5.4.15 on windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and have noticed the following error in the Apache error log:

AH00124: Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace.

I have a multisite install of WordPress running and I think the error is coming from an error in the htaccess rewrites.

Looking at this post: Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error.?

They suggest to replace this:

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

with this piece of code, courtesy of Scott Yang:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /index.php/$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

However, my WordPress htaccess looks a little different so I dont just want to replace my code just in case I inadvertently replace something that I need.

Here is my htaccess:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^wp-admin$ wp-admin/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule ^(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*.php)$ $1 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Can anyone suggest what I need to change?

Answer 1

This problem can be caused by requests for certain files that don't exist. For example, requests for files in wp-content/uploads/ where the file does not exist.

If this is the situation you're seeing, you can solve the problem by going to .htaccess and changing this line:

RewriteRule ^(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $1 [L]

to:

RewriteRule ^(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) - [L]

The underlying issue is that the rule above triggers a rewrite to the exact same url with a slash in front and because there was a rewrite, the newly rewritten request goes back through the rules again and the same rule is triggered. By changing that line's "$1" to "-", no rewrite happens and so the rewriting process does not start over again with the same URL.

It's possible that there's a difference in how apache 2.2 and 2.4 handle this situation of only-difference-is-a-slash-in-front and that's why the default rules provided by WordPress aren't working perfectly.