.htaccess Basics
A .htaccess file is a special file used to control certain aspects of your website. With .htaccess you can:
1. Password protect directories
2. Point domains and subdomains to specific directories
3. Block traffic to your website
4. and more
When you place a .htaccess file in a directory, it will affect that directory and all directories below that one.
To create a .htaccess file:
1. Create an empty text file (named htaccess.txt) in Notepad
2. Add the contents of your .htaccess file
3. Upload the file to your package in the appropriate directory for what you want to do
4. Rename the file .htaccess
5. Note – You can also save the file directly in NotePad as “.htaccess” by putting quotes around the name during the save. But if you do that be sure your FTP program will still upload it in ASCII format.
Some of the simple “one liners” are:
1. To disallow the showing of default index pages Options -indexes
2. To turn indexes back on in a lower directory Options +indexes
3. To redirect requests to a document or directory Redirect /olddirectory http://domain.com/newdirectory/
4. Have your HTML (.htm) pages processed as PHP (.php) pages AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .htm
5. To use a different startup page DirectoryIndex filename.htm
6. To force all files of a certain type to download rather than open ForceType applicaton/octet-stream
7. To use a custom error page ErrorDocument 404 /errorpage.htm
The error codes you can use, and what they mean, are listed below:
* 401 – Not Authorized – example is a failed htaccess/htpasswd request
* 403 – Forbidden – example is requesting a default directory index if Options -indexes
* 404 – Not Found – example is an invalid file name
* 500 – Internal Server Error – example is an invalid htaccess file
