I'm working in a hosted situation where I have a primary webroot located in ~/www. I have several subdomains hosted in ~/www/__subdomains. In the primary webroot, I have a .htaccess file that does a bit of minor rewriting. In two of my subdomains, I have similar .htaccess files and these subdomains respond properly.
In 2 other, newly created subdomains, I have .htaccess files that are empty save for an AddHandler directive. What I'm finding is that the root .htaccess file's existence/content affects these 2 subdomains. They throw a 500 error. As soon as I rename that one, the broken subdomains work.
This, of course, breaks the other sites so I can't just move this off, but it violates my understanding of how .htaccess recursion works. I thought that as long as there was a .htaccess file in a subdirectory, those in ancestor directories would never get executed.
Clearly, I'm wrong about that so I'm hoping someone can educate me and help me get this fixed.
Thanks.
.htaccess files are applied from the current directory up, stopping at the main configuration. Any rules and directives that are in the current directory's .htaccess file, supersede any other rules found while evaluating .htaccess further up.
However, the problem, as you've found, is that rules that aren't explicitly overridden, are applied from the other files. You can reference the Apache .htaccess Tutorial for further explanation, specifically, the How directives are applied section.
Hope that helps.
Related
Naturally, I have a .htaccess file in /var/www/html.
However, I'd like to use an independant file (e.g. .rewrites) within /var/www/html that only contains my URL rewrites. Is this possible to achieve by adding a line in the .htaccess files telling it to include the .rewrites file when being read?
Long story short: no, I'm affraid it can't be done. There is no way, at the time of writing this, to "merge" or "include" contents in an .htaccess file.
It is possible to declare multiple files names in the apache AccessFileName directive, however, the first one from the list that's found in the directory wins, and, as they can't be merged, others (if present) should just be ignored, afaik.
Edit: You can read the (very) long version at Apache Docs and check the directives marked 'h' (for .htaccess).
While you cant put all your rewrites in 1 .htaccess file, what I do is instead of using .htaccess files I put all my rewrites in the apache config files directly. This assumes you admin the web server and have access to the config files, and you dont have users that need access to them.
Years ago, I would just have a section in httpd.conf where I put all my rewrites but since Redhat and others have split up the configs into seperate files I have a file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/rewrites.conf that contains all the rewrites.
the goal
Redirecting mydomain.com/something to mysite.com/something
the problem
Any domain that you throw at the server gets 302 redirected to www.mysite.com and, for the life of me, I can't find the config rule that is doing this!
what i've done so far
I've grepped everything in the /etc/apache2 folder for 'mysite.com', 'Redirect', 'redirect', and other, as well as scour by hand all the apache config files looking for this redirect rule to no avail.
Any and all help in finding the culprit redirect is greatly appreciated. I'm not a sysadmin so there must be a place I don't know of where this might be other than the /etc/apache2 folder...
Thank you kindly for helping me with my first SO question :)
The file which includes redirection rules does not have to be in /etc/apache2 folder. Check your document root folder (the path of which you can find in your vhost configuration file) for .htaccess files. They may have redirect rules too.
The problem was with an .htaccess in the docroot of another domain on the server. This other domain was higher alphabetically and was treated as the default domain.
I solved the problem by creating a new vhost for the domain that i wanted to redirect and it was handled properly.
Thank you all for your help!
Let's say I have a domain called www.customer1.com and www.customer2.com. I want to run all the pages of these sites separately... but items found within certain paths, I'd like to reference from one domain to another in a masked forwarded manner for SEO purposes and to avoid having to place files in two different FTP accounts.
The target folders are
/images
/pdfs
FOr example if a call is made to
www.customer2.com/images/[any image] then I want the masked forwarder to kick in to serve a file that is located at www.customer1.com/images/[filename requested]. Same goes for anything found after /pdf/ in the same example.
However all other pages should remain referencing to internal files within.
I have limited understanding of .htaccess and frankly lost as to how to approach anything beyond a very simple 30
Not sure you understand the concept here, as the "forwarding" would equate to an external redirect, there is no "masking" anywhere. The closest thing there is is reverse proxying:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(images|pdf)/(.*)$ http://www.customer1.com/$1/$2 [L,P]
You need mod_proxy to do this and those rules need to be in the htaccess file in your customer2.com's document root.
You can also do this in customer2.com's server/vhost config:
ProxyPass /images/ http://www.customer1.com/images/
ProxyPass /pdf/ http://www.customer1.com/pdf/
For the love of God, I can't seem to get this mod_rewrite working properly. Instead of doing brute force trial-and-error, let me ask here.
I want mod_rewrite rules to apply to ALL domains.
I want mod_rewrite entries in httpd.conf
I want to get rid of this WWW virus (for SEO purposes):
http://www.example.com > http://example.com
I want to get rid of index.html (for SEO, google indexes it instead of just domain):
http://www.example.com/index.html > http://example.com
http://www.example.com/some/index.html > http://example.com/some/index.html
Domains are inside <virtualhost> entries. I couldnt figure out where to put what or which one should take priority. As i mentioned, I would like to apply these 2 rules to ALL DOMAINS in the server.
The situation is exacerbated by ssl.conf. Will all these need to be entered into ssl.conf too? What will happen when there are 2 redirects like:
http://www.example.com/index.html > http://example.com/index.html > http://example.com
Thank you so much. This has quickly become all so confusing.
Maria
This solves it for me. As I suspected, there is a whole lotta difference where rewriterule is applied. Many people including mean seems to be unaware of this.
http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/RewriteContext
The Apache HTTPD Server deals with requests in discrete phases. While this is usually transparent to the user and administrator it does have an effect on the behaviour of mod_rewrite when rulesets are placed in different contexts. To oversimplify a little, when rules are placed in VirtualHost blocks (or in the main server context) they get evaluated before the server has yet mapped the requested URI to a filesystem path. Conversely, when rules are placed in .htaccess files, or in Directory blocks in the main server config, they are evaluated after this phase has occured.
I need to do a url-rewriting job now.
I don't know whether I should put the code into a .htaccess or httpd.conf?
EDIT
What's the effecting range of .htaccess?Will it affect all requests or only requests to the specific directory it's located?
If you wont have to change your rules very often, you should put them in the httpd.conf and turn off overriding in the top directory your rules apply to
AllowOverride None
With no overriding, your apache will not scan every directory for .htaccess files making less of an overhead for each request.
Whenever you do have to change your rules, you will have to restart your apache server if you put it in your httpd.conf as opposed to them being instantly detected in .htaccess files because it reads them all on every request.
You can easily do this using a graceful restart with the apachectl tool to avoid cutting off any current requests being served.
apachectl graceful
If you aren't going to turn override off, you might as well just use .htaccess only.
Edit in response to your edit:
Say you have a request for www.example.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/file
Apache will look for a .htaccess file in all 3 of those directories and the root for rules to apply to the request if you have overriding allowed.
Ease of use and IMO maintainability (just go to the dir you want as any permissioned user) = .htaccess but that is parsed repeatedly vs. the parse once in httpd.conf where your über-high volume would be best set.
There are three issues here in terms of which is "better":
performance
management
security
.htaccess is slower, harder to manage, and potentially less secure. If you have access to the httpd.conf, then placing rules there can be easier to manage (in one place), faster ("AllowOverrides None" means that the server does not look in the current directory and any parent directories for an override file to parse and follow), and since .htaccess files are not present in the website directory, they cannot be edited (and if created, will be ignored).
You may use both of them. IMHO, .htaccess will be a bit better