RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^post/tag/ RewriteRule .* - [F]
The REQUEST_URI
server var does start with a slash (it is a full root-relative URL-path), although you do say you have tried this “with and without the leading slash”, so this should have worked if that is what you are referring to and /post
is the first path-segment in the URL-path.
However, you don’t need the additional RewriteCond
directive here as the URL check can (and should) be performed in the RewriteRule
directive instead. For example:
RewriteRule ^post/tag/ - [F]
In this case, there is no slash prefix on the RewriteRule
pattern.
If that is still failing then try matching against THE_REQUEST
instead, which contains the first line of the request headers and is not modified by other rewrites (unlike REQUEST_URI
and the URL-path matched by the RewriteRule
directive).
For example:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,7}\s/post/tag/
RewriteRule ^ - [F]
THE_REQUEST
would contain a string of the form:
GET /post/tag/example-here HTTP/1.1
Still not working… then make sure you don’t have a custom 403 ErrorDocument
that is routing the request through WordPress. If you have not defined anything yourself, then this could still be defined in the server config (by your host), which you can reset to the Apache default with the following in .htaccess
:
ErrorDocument 403 default