Htaccess file
Htaccess stands for Hypertext Access. It is a configuration file. This file is very handy when a user doesn't have access to the server configuration file. Users are allowed to change the name from .htaccess to something else.
Change or view access file name
file configurations are located here /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
.
//...
# AccessFileName: The name of the file to look for in each directory
# for additional configuration directives. See also the AllowOverride
# directive.
#
AccessFileName .htaccess
#
# The following lines prevent .htaccess and .htpasswd files from being
# viewed by Web clients.
#
<FilesMatch "^\.ht">
Require all denied
</FilesMatch>
//...
How to enable
It is possible that rewrite rule is not enabled by default.
1. Enable Apache mod_rewrite module
sudo a2enmod rewrite
2. Enable overwrite in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
. Find <Directory /var/www/> //...Some content</Directory>
and set AllowOverride All
//...
<Directory /var/www/>
//...
AllowOverride All
//...
</Directory>
//...
Now restart
How to use
You can use one .htaccess
file inside a folder and fortunately, there is no limit. Using multiple .htaccess
files in a project is so handy.
- Create a .htaccess file
- Enable the rewrite engine by writing
RewriteEngine On
Comment
Comments are started with #
Example: # This is a comment
RewriteCond
RewriteCond
allows executing an action with a condition. It is similar to if
in a programming language.
Example: We want to redirect user to a specific page if requested url is not a file and also not a folder
# Turn on rewrite engine
RewriteEngine On
# Is a file?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
# Is a folder
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# Condition matched
# Redirect to index.php then it will do something with this request
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php
RewiteRule
RewriteRule
is used to rewrite requests.
//...
# Redirect to index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php
Common use cases
- Block directory listing
- Redirect users to another location
- Force HTTPS
- And more...
Example
Redirect any URL to a specific file. In this case, Iโm redirecting to index.php. Here, we cannot access a file or folder since we don't use any conditions.
RewriteEngine On
# Redirect all request to index.php file
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php
Note: When we use a .htaccess
file in the project root folder to redirect all requests to a specific file (e.g. api.php
), and there is no condition. Unfortunately at some point we figure out that, we have a folder called public
and users need to access it for files eg: image.img
, we can do that by just creating a empty .htaccess
file with RewriteEngine On
. This file will overwrite all of the previous conditions. Horray, now users can access the public
folder https://www.example.com/public
.
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