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.htaccess file - Overview This strangely named file is they key to getting the most out of your virtual server. Actually, the filename makes pretty good sense once you know that files that start with a dot, are hidden files in a Unix-like environment, and that 'ht' is derived from 'HTTP', and well access from access. The .htaccess file is basically a text file with some instructions, stored somewhere on the server (preferably in the root of your website).
Deny access to certain IP-addresses You can deny access to certain IPs. If you don't want someone to access your site place the following code into your .htaccess file: <Limit GET> This code will block 123.456.789.0 IP and all others that are starting with 128.45.67. Everybody else will be able to access your site. You can block as many addresses as you want. Most servers have index.html as their default page. This means that when you access http://www.weethet.nl/, you will automatically be redirected to http://www.weethet.nl/index.html. Let's say you want the default to be start.html. All you need to do is to add the following line to your .htaccess file: DirectoryIndex start.html Automatically redirecting users to another page It may be necessary to redirect a user from one page to another. Commonly this is needed when you have restuctured your website and gave some files a new location, or - like I did - had to rename all files because I started using ASP. Without a redirect, the user will encounter a 404 File Not Found Error from you site. This is not very usefull to the visitor, you'd rather redirect him or her to the new location or new file that replaces the old one, so the visitor can see the info they are looking for. You could go for a little JavaScript (see Autoredirect in HTML) or rather simple by adding a line to your .htaccess file: Redirect /oldpage.htm /newdirectory/newpage.php You can add as many lines as necessary, just keep it in the same format. You can also redirect several pages to one main page. I used that for showing the error, informing the user to update their bookmakrs and to automatically redirect to the actual page. Click here to see a life example. Directory to Directory redirection Suppose you used to have a directory /dutch/content, but you moved the files to /blabla/textfiles. This means that each URL with "/dutch/content/" should be replaced with the same lnk with "/blabla/textfiles/" instead:
Iedere link waarin dus staat http://www.weethet.nl/dutch/content/, wordt veranderd naar http//www.weethet.nl/blabla/textfiles/ Als voorbeeld; je wilt de pagina http://www.weethet.nl/dutch/content/search.php openen. Filetype to filetype redirection This one looks a bit more complicated. Say you want to redirect all ASP pages (*.ASP) to PHP pages (*.PHP).
Here each *.asp link will be redirected to the same link, now with the .php extension. Basically it says: zero or more random characters (="(.*)\") ending with .asp (=".asp") at the end of the line (="$"), should be redirected to http://www.weethet.nl (="http://www.weethet.nl") with the same link as the found string minus the .asp extension (="$1") with a .php extension (=".php"). Preventing someone from viewing my .htaccess file The .htaccess file typically resides in your root directory and can be viewed through the web browser. Most of the time there is information contained the the .htaccess file that you don't want people knowing, like the rules for allowing or denying access. One way to prevent access to the .htaccess file is to disable access to that particular filename. You can add the following lines to your .htaccess file in the root directory to deny visitors from viewing all .htaccess files contained in your website: <Files .htaccess> Prevent someone from linking to my downloads This may sound a bit sick and sad, but now-a-days, one get's billed for the bandwidth used, so if others do not wish to have these costs (or they are to lazy) they might link to the files on your site rather than linking to your website in general. This text refers to an .htaccess file inside your download directory! Add these lines to your .htaccess file and stop people from linking to your downloads and claiming it is theirs. You can also redirect them to another page of your choice. AuthUserFile /dev/null "http://www.example1.com" (example2, etc.) is the URL where the downloads can occur. The numbers 123.123.123.123 is your IP address for your site. "http://www.domain.com/page.htm" is the page that an unauthorized person is redirected to. Be sure to keep the syntax in place and only change the URL's to your domain. This will stop the download of any files in it's directory. You should create a separate directory for your downloads. If you place this file in the root directory you will be redirecting them to your RewriteRule page. I suspect we've all seen this before:
But we've probably all run into a page like the following too:
These pages are examples of Error Documents. The top example is the standard error (404 - File Not Found), and the bottom example is an example of what you can replace it with. You can even have one for each directory if you want. Often these pages have a link back to the referering page or a link to the new location of an old page. Most types of errors that the web server can run into have error numbers. For example "File Not Found" is error 404. (List of Errors below) The specification of an error document is easy. 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:
Som websites allow you (this is a defaut setting!) to browse directories on your webserver by simply entering URL+directory name in a webbrowser. Usually this is not something you would want. Copy the following line into the .htaccess file found in the root of the website, it will disable this browsing feature. Options Includes FollowSymLinks
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