Recently I had to set up a Wordpress blog on a Windows 2003 server, which involved installing Apache, PHP and MySQL.  Everything went pretty well - except for the typical PHP.ini problems I shall write about later.

Once the database was set up and I had the blog running, I tried to adjust the permalink structure using .htaccess rewrite rules so they would be more human-readable.

Out of the box, mod_rewrite isn’t enabled on Windows Apache.

The steps I took to resolve the problem were:

  1. Uncomment the line containing ‘LoadModule mod_rewrite modules/mod_rewrite.so’

  2. In the VirtualHost directive hosting the blog, add ‘AllowOveride All’

  3. Restart Apache

It works like a charm, now.  All the tools ship with Apache, it’s just a matter of configuring them as needed.