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.htaccess files are like lemon to lemondade. How do you make lemonade
without lemons?
Now I know what you're going to say."Ah, there's lots of ways
to reuse similar functions and functionality across a website. Especially
with the fact that now a days you have all of the object components
that have been programmed and are sitting out there on the market
waiting for you to buy and use them."
Yes I know, but complicated doesn't always mean better. To clarify,
in your toolbox you should always have the basics. That is a hammer,
a screwdriver, a pair of heavy duty gloves, an adjustable wrench
and so on. This is what an .htaccess file is to you.
In fact it's a bit unfortunate because you hardly hear about them
these days. It's like they're too old or something to be considered
much anymore. Well I'll let you know right now that you're at a
high disadvantage if you aren't aware of this tool at your disposal.
So, here are the basics of putting .htaccess files to use in your
website.
- Please keep in mind this only works on Unix servers, primarily
the Apache web server. Various apache directives are used
to enable .htaccess file options. If you are using a Windows server,
the .htaccess won't be any good to you.
- The .htaccess file takes effect from the top-level directory
it is placed in. In other words, if you put your.htaccess file
into the root level of your website then all directories under
the root are affected.
 So if
you only want to enforce certain directives with a sub-directory
or folder, then put your .htaccess file in that folder only.
- You will need to write it out in a plain text editor
such as Notepad or SimpleText. You don't want any formatting
in there or wierd ASCII characters lurking in it. In other words,
don't type this up in MS Word!
- The name of it is .htaccess. This is NOT a file extension
such file.htaccess The period preceeds the htaccess part. It is
simply named .htaccess
- When you FTP it up to your webserver, you will need to make
sure that it's done in ASCII mode. This preserves it's original
state and doesn't try to convert the actual file format as "binary"
mode does.
Okay, with those basics said now, here's what you can do with this
little critter.
Standardizing your header, footer, and side navigational structure
This means two things to you.
- Having a consistent website - this means that the footer
is the same in every page and is the header.
- Having only one file to update - for example when you
change the copyright year to read 2004 you only need to change
one file in your entire site for this to make effect within every
webpage that references that file.
Here's the line of code you would use to do this.
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html
This is simply saying I want to add an external html file that
will parsed by the webserver when a page is called up from the browser.
Shut off diectory browsing
What this means is you disallow someone from snooping around
in your directories and sub-directories.
These days now many web hosts set that up for you automatically,
so you don't even have to be aware of this. But still what you don't
know can hurt you. This is an item that falls in the web security
catagory.
Here's the code to do this.
Options -Indexes
If you just want to disallow directory browing for a specific index
then you would list that index as such.
Options -images -scripts -docs
Here you would list out the directories you want to block access
to.
This writing doesn't cover everything you can do with a .htaccess
file. These tricks are simply two of the most valuable tricks I
have found I can do with them. See my suggestions below for a more
comprehensive .htaccess tutorial.
.htaccess Resources & Tutorials
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