htaccess examples

Temporarily take site down for maintenance

Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^111\.111\.222\.111 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/index.html$ RewriteRule $ /index.html [R=302,L]
or
Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/oldsite/ RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^123\.111\.123\.111 RewriteRule (.*) http://www.thedomain.com/oldsite/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirecting to a New Domain

Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Force https use

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !443 RewriteRule (.*) https://www.thedomain.com/ [R]
or

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$ RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R]

Use a Custom Error Document

ErrorDocument 404 /mynotfound.html

Allowing access only from internal network

order deny,allow allow from 123.123. deny from all

Blocking Unwanted User-Agents

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(.*)80legs [NC,OR] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://80legs.com/ [L,R=301]

Password protecting a directory with htaccess and htpasswd

Enter the following into the .htaccess file:

 AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd

AuthName "Restricted Area"

AuthType Basic

Require valid-user

And then create the .htpasswd file with the following:



htpasswd -c .htpasswd theusername

There are also online tools for creating the paswords e.g.:
http://www.htaccesstools.com/htpasswd-generator/

Redirect old address to new domain

Example http://www.domain.co.uk/mysite to http://www.mysite.com



Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.co.uk [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Allowing Directory Browsing in single directories with .htaccess

Having a directory full of downloadable files can be useful and although it is generally accepted that allowing directory browsing from within the Apache configuration file might be a bit of a security issue, directory browsing for single directories can be useful and can be achieved using the following in a .htaccess file:



Options +Indexes

DirectoryIndex nonexistantfile.html nonexistantfile.htm

The reason why I have specified the DirectoryIndex as nonexistantfile.html is to ensure that if someone (or script) accidentally copies an index.html file into the directory that it won’t be used and instead the contents of the directory will be listed/browsable. Some Content Management Systems will copy new index.html files into directories even if you don’t want them 😉.htaccess URL Rewriting
The following tool is useful for generating Rewrite Rules for SEO friendly URL’s in an Apache .htaccess file.
http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/url-rewrite.html

.htaccess Referers

I recently needed an intranet website to be protected so that only authorised users could get access to it. Since there is already a part of the website which requires a login and authentication to a directory I had a link placed on this page. The .htaccess file needed to accept referers only from the domain of the authenticated site. Since this new site was a single html page with hundreds of links to PDF files I also needed to add a referer for the HTML page that contained the links. Clear as mud? Yes. OK an example. The following code will not allow connections directly to www.theseconddomain.com .
www.theseconddomain.com can only be accessed by clicking a link on www.thefirstdomain.co.uk that points to www.theseconddomain.com
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer www\.thefirstdomain\.co\.uk good_referer=1 SetEnvIfNoCase Referer www\.theseconddomain\.com/index.html good_referer=1 order allow,deny allow from env=good_referer ErrorDocument 403 http://www.thefirstdomain.co.uk/error.htm

Apache Authentication with Active Directory (LDAP)

Good article about this here.

A .htaccess file can be used to protect a directory on an Apache2 server. The code to use is:
AuthType Basic AuthBasicProvider ldap AuthUserFile /dev/null AuthName "Test LDAP" AuthLDAPURL "ldap://xxxx.ads.tla.co.uk:389/OU=Staff,OU=ORG,dc=ads,dc=tla,dc=co,dc=uk?sAMAccountName?sub?(objectClass=*)" AuthLDAPBindDN CN=FullDNtoADuser,DC=tld,DC=co,DC=uk AuthLDAPBindPassword myADpassword AuthLDAPGroupAttributeIsDN on require valid-user
The values need to be changed to reflect the Active Directory structure. The most important line appears to be AuthLDAURL which is the LDAP search.

To use Exchange it may be possible to use:
AuthLDAPURL "ldap://ldap.yourdomain.com:389/cn=Recipients,ou=ServerName,o=DomainName?uid?sub?(objectClass=*)"