Maybe the (.+?) is causing the problem? Can Apache do non-greedy matching? You could try something like ([^/]+) maybe?

@abompard correct me if I am mistaken but your regex would only work for single level repositories and not for those down one level (i.e. "namespace/repository" like "fedora-council/tickets"). Is this patch worth trying as compared to the likes #2959 and #2960?

Ah, right, there can be a / in repo names, I forgot.

So, this would then transparently proxy these for folks, so they would still see the forge url, etc, but apache would fetch from pagure on the backend?

I think we should test this in staging... so fine with me to merge and just deploy to staging.
Perhaps we drop the prod part for now pending that testing tho?