Introduction
The
".htaccess" file is a simple text file that may be located
in one or many directories in your virtual server. Traditionally,
this file has controlled access to pages in a given directory,
but with the newer versions of Apache, some of the server
configuration parameters are controllable from the this
file as well. When
your virtual server receives a request for a file, it
checks in the top directory for a .htaccess file, and
then checks each subdirectory down to and including
the directory that your file is in. Thus you can set
the defaults for all directories in a virtual domain
by placing a .htaccess file in the top directory of
that domain, or set configuration and access parameters
for one or several individual directories independent
of each other..
You
can use the .htaccess file to:
NOTE:
Do NOT edit the .htaccess file if you are using MS FrontPage!
FrontPage uses the .htaccess file for its own purposes,
and editing it may cause errors in your configuration.
This
is convenient way to direct a browser to a different page
if you've re-organized your web-site or otherwise deleted
or renamed a page. For example, if you moved a page in
somedir from somepage1.html to somepage2.html, the appropriate
line to add to your .htaccess file would be:
Redirect
/somedir/somepage1.html http://yourdomain.tld/somedir/somepage2.html
Since
you get to specify the full URL to the new page, you
can bounce the browser to another server if you want
Redirects work for directories as well, ie:
Redirect
/somedir http://yourdomain.tld/newdir
In
this case, the requested document was /somedir/foo.html
... since the /somedir part matched the Redirect request,
the remaining part of the URL (/foo.html) was tacked
onto the redirect, ultimately taking you to http://yourdomain.tld/newdir/foo.html
Every
now and then, you may find yourself in a situation where
you will need to deny certain visitors access to your
site. This visitors may be badly behaving bots that request
hundreds of pages per minute, or perhaps someone maliciously
abusing your resources. In any case, the first level response
is to block access with your .htacccess file.
The
most common scenario is where you want everyone except
a few specific visitors to be able to access your site.
Your .htaccess file would start like this (lines in
bold text are the actual lines that you would
add to your .htaccess file):
order allow,deny
allow from all
Then you follow that with lines to specify which address(es)
you want to block:
deny
from 192.168.128.14
denies access only to the specific IP 192.168.128.14
deny from 192.168.128
denies access to the entire IP range of 192.168.128.0
- 192.168.128.255
deny from foo.example.com
denies access to anyone coming from the foo.example.com
subdomain, but allows people from example.com to still
access your site.
deny
from .example.com
denies access to all of example.com, including any subdomains
Error
Documents
We're all familiar with the generic type of Not Found
(404) error page:
We've
probably all run into a page like the following too:
 |
Oops!
You seem to have found a bad link.
The page you are looking for might
have been removed, had its name changed,
or is temporarily unavailable. |
|
Often
these pages have a link back to the referering page, and
might show you the URL that you tried to access. This
is an example of a custom Error Document.
Most
errors that the web server runs into have error numbers.
For example, "Not Found" is error 404. To specify an
error document in your .htaccess file, you add "ErrorDocument",
the three digits of the error number and the either
the error string or the page to go to. The following
examples show the three forms; you can call your custom
error documents anything you like, we use /<errornum>.html
for the sake of simplicity:
ErrorDocument
401 /401.html
ErrorDocument 403 /402.html
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
You can also specify the error documents in the form:
ErrorDocument 404 http://yourdomain.tld/404.html
Changing
Mime-types is easy. Just create a .htaccess file that
looks like this: AddType
new-mime-type extension
ie;
AddType
text/html .txt
|
