How To Stop WordPress From Auto-Creating A Htaccess File

A while back I wrote a post entitled “How To Redirect All Non-WWW Traffic To WWW“. I left out one important bit of info in that post for WordPress users.

If you update any info in the “General” options page, the redirection may no longer occur.

This happens because WordPress has a function called “flush_rules” which is called whenever you click Save in the General options page (not sure if it does it on other option pages). The function deletes the old rules then writes new ones in the .htaccess where your install is located. If you do what I did and made another htaccess there, it would simply be written over (and mucking around with permissions to prevent that is annoying and may not work, especially if your host runs PHP security extensions that run scripts under your user).

So, I looked around in the WordPress source and figured out how to prevent that from happening. The code is in the wp-includes/rewrite.php file. All I did was comment out the code inside the flush_rules() function by adding /* and */ before and after this code:

generate_page_uri_index();
delete_option('rewrite_rules');
$this->wp_rewrite_rules();
if ( function_exists('save_mod_rewrite_rules') )
save_mod_rewrite_rules();

Is now:

generate_page_uri_index();
delete_option('rewrite_rules');
$this->wp_rewrite_rules();
/*if ( function_exists('save_mod_rewrite_rules') )
save_mod_rewrite_rules();*/

I learned that you cannot comment out the first few lines, if you do you cannot create new pages, the last 2 lines are what save the data to .htaccess. Make sure you do not comment out the function declaration for flush_rules, or else you will get PHP errors.

This seemed to work perfectly for me, and now I don’t have to worry about WordPress’ “feature” becoming an annoyance.

Just a quick note: if you do this change and you want to change your blog’s URL, you should probably enable that code once more.

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