CodeIgniter URLs

By default, URLs in CodeIgniter are designed to be search-engine and human-friendly. Rather than using the standard “query-string” approach to URLs that is synonymous with dynamic systems, CodeIgniter uses a segment-based approach:

https://example.com/news/article/my_article

Your URLs can be defined using the URI Routing feature with flexibility.

The URI Library and the URL Helper contain functions that make it easy to work with your URI data.

URL Structure

Base URL contains only the Hostname

When you have the Base URL https://www.example.com/ and imagine the following URL:

https://www.example.com/blog/news/2022/10?page=2

We use the following terms:

Term	Example	Description
Base URL	https://www.example.com/	Base URL is often denoted as baseURL.
URI path	/blog/news/2022/10
Route path	/blog/news/2022/10	The URI path relative to the Base URL. It is also called as URI string.
Query	page=2

Base URL contains Sub folders

When you have the Base URL https://www.example.com/ci-blog/ and imagine the following URL:

https://www.example.com/ci-blog/blog/news/2022/10?page=2

We use the following terms:

Term	Example	Description
Base URL	https://www.example.com/ci-blog/	Base URL is often denoted as baseURL.
URI path	/ci-blog/blog/news/2022/10
Route path	/blog/news/2022/10	The URI path relative to the Base URL. It is also called as URI string.
Query	page=2

Removing the index.php file

When you use Apache Web Server, by default, the index.php file will be needed in your URLs:

example.com/index.php/news/article/my_article

If your server supports rewriting URLs you can easily remove this file with URL rewriting. This is handled differently by different servers, but we will show examples for the two most common web servers here.

Apache Web Server

Apache must have the mod_rewrite extension enabled. If it does, you can use a .htaccess file with some simple rules. Here is an example of such a file, using the “negative” method in which everything is redirected except the specified items:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

In this example, any HTTP request other than those for existing directories and existing files are treated as a request for your index.php file.

Note

These specific rules might not work for all server configurations.

Note

Make sure to also exclude from the above rules any assets that you might need to be accessible from the outside world.

nginx

Under nginx, you can define a location block and use the try_files directive to get the same effect as we did with the above Apache configuration:

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
}

This will first look for a file or directory matching the URI (constructing the full path to each file from the settings of the root and alias directives), and then sends the request to the index.php file along with any arguments.