Redirect all traffic to index.php using mod_rewrite

Question

I\'m trying to build a url shortener, and I want to be able to take any characters immediately after the domain and have them passed as a variable url. So for example

Answer 1

ByTheWay don't forget to enable mod rewrite,in apache on ubuntu

sudo a2enmod rewrite 

and then restart apache2

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

edit: it is an old question that helped me but I lost hours testing my apache2.conf file on one side and .htaccess file on the other side and still no light.