The default htaccess file is unusable for a Rails application that is accessed via an Apache Alias directive.
From http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritebase:
"If your webserver's URLs are not directly related to physical file paths, you have to use RewriteBase in every .htaccess files where you want to use RewriteRule directives."
In my case, I tried to do the following in my httpd.conf
Alias /myrailsapp /path/to/myrailsapp/public
But when I tried to access http://myserver/myrailsapp, Apache would generate the following error:
mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached. Assuming configuration error.
The solution is to use the RewriteBase directive in the htaccess file, for example:
RewriteBase /myrailsapp
This wasn't an easy problem to diagnose, there is a lot of mod_rewrite documentation to go through.
