All PURLs redirect to the config repo root instead of their configured targets

[bendichter]

All term PURLs I have tried, including the test cases documented in the config files, currently redirect to the root of this config repository rather than to their configured targets. This affects the resolution chain from Bioregistry, which registers https://purl.brain-bican.org/ontology/mbao/MBA_$1 as the URI format for the mba prefix, so bioregistry.io/mba:985 currently dead-ends at this repo's front page.

Observed behavior (2026-08-26):

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} -> %{redirect_url}\n" https://purl.brain-bican.org/ontology/mbao/MBA_997
302 -> https://github.com/brain-bican/purl.brain-bican.org/

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} -> %{redirect_url}\n" https://purl.brain-bican.org/ontology/mbao/MBA_985
302 -> https://github.com/brain-bican/purl.brain-bican.org/

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} -> %{redirect_url}\n" https://purl.brain-bican.org/ontology/hbao/HBA_3999
302 -> https://github.com/brain-bican/purl.brain-bican.org/

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} -> %{redirect_url}\n" https://purl.brain-bican.org/ontology/mbao
302 -> https://github.com/brain-bican/purl.brain-bican.org/

MBA_997 is the test case listed in config/ontology/mbao.yml, which specifies that ^/ontology/mbao/MBA_(\d+)$ should redirect to the corresponding OLS4 term page. That OLS4 target itself works fine (returns 200), so the config and its targets look correct. The bare /ontology/mbao path is also affected: its configured base_redirect is the mouse_brain_atlas_ontology repo, but it too lands on this config repo instead.

Since even the documented test cases fall through to a single catch-all redirect, it looks like the deployed Apache server is not applying the rewrite rules generated from the YAML configs, rather than a problem with any individual config entry.

One additional observation: requests for ontology products fail at the TLS layer rather than redirecting.

$ curl -s https://purl.brain-bican.org/ontology/mbao/mbao.owl
curl: (35) ... (reproducible SSL error)

I ran into this while checking identifier resolvability for a BIDS specification proposal (bids-standard/bids-specification#2481), where we point to MBA terms. Happy to provide more detail if useful.