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AnHonestHost DevandClaude Opus 5 063f992516 chore: version-control the WHMCS KB redirect rules
These 301s live in .htaccess on secure.anhonesthost.com and existed only
on that server. WHMCS rewrites .htaccess during some updates, which would
silently drop them — every retired KB URL would start 404ing with nothing
in version control to restore from.

deploy/README.md documents where it installs, how to reinstall, and the
two traps: article/category IDs collide (only the trailing .html tells
them apart, so rule order is load-bearing) and the slug is ignored.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-01 17:27:59 -07:00

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# 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.