# Deploy artefacts

Config that lives on other servers but belongs under version control here,
because it exists to serve this KB.

## `whmcs-kb-redirects.conf`

301 redirects that send the retired WHMCS knowledgebase
(`secure.anhonesthost.com/knowledgebase/*`) to its replacement pages on
kb.anhonesthost.com. Installed 2026-08-01.

**Where it lives in production:** `/home/whmcs/public_html/.htaccess` on
`secure.anhonesthost.com`, prepended **before** the
`### BEGIN - WHMCS managed rules ###` marker. It has to come first — WHMCS's
own block ends with a catch-all that routes everything to `index.php`, so
rules placed after it never run.

The canonical copy on that server is `/root/kb-redirects.conf`, and the
pre-migration `.htaccess` is backed up at
`/root/htaccess-backup-20260801.bak`.

### Reinstalling

WHMCS rewrites `.htaccess` during some updates, which will silently drop
these rules. To restore:

```bash
cd /home/whmcs/public_html
cp -a .htaccess /root/htaccess-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).bak   # keep whatever WHMCS wrote
cat /root/kb-redirects.conf /root/htaccess-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).bak > /tmp/htaccess.new
install -o whmcs -g whmcs -m 644 /tmp/htaccess.new .htaccess
apachectl -t
```

Then spot-check a redirect:

```bash
curl -sI https://secure.anhonesthost.com/knowledgebase/13/x.html | grep -i location
# expect: https://kb.anhonesthost.com/support/remote-support/
```

### Two things that will bite you when editing it

**Article and category IDs collide.** Both use the shape
`/knowledgebase/<id>/<slug>`, and the same number means different things —
article 5 is "What are my Name Servers?", category 5 is "WordPress Specific".
The *only* discriminator is the trailing `.html` on articles. That's why every
article rule appears before every category rule and terminates with `[L]`: by
the time the broad category patterns run, anything ending `.html` is already
gone. Reordering the file breaks this silently, and the wrong page still
returns 200.

**The slug is ignored.** WHMCS reads only the id, so any slug with the right
id resolves. The rules match `[^/]*` for the slug for the same reason.

Legacy pre-SEO URLs (`knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=N` and
`?action=displaycat&catid=N`) are mapped explicitly. `(^|&)id=` cannot match
`catid=` — the preceding character is `t`, not `&` or start-of-string — so the
two sets can't cross-fire.
