Servage Magazine

The .htaccess files are often underrated and forgotten, but they do have great powers to manipulate your web server. It’s possible to set and change various server settings, for example the Apache configuration. Thereby you can have individual configurations based on files in folders, rather than configuration files that require server restarts to take effect. You can also change settings for plugins, like PHP settings. I’ve stumbled over a few great .htaccess snippets here, which I found quite useful and wanted to share.

Remove www in url

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^your-site.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://your-site.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Prevent hot linking

RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

Redirect all WordPress feeds to feed burner

<IfModule mod_alias.c>
 RedirectMatch 301 /feed/(atom|rdf|rss|rss2)/?$ http://feedburner.com/yourfeed/
 RedirectMatch 301 /comments/feed/(atom|rdf|rss|rss2)/?$ http://feedburner.com/yourfeed/
</IfModule>

Create custom error pages

ErrorDocument 400 /errors/badrequest.html
ErrorDocument 401 /errors/authreqd.html
ErrorDocument 403 /errors/forbid.html
ErrorDocument 404 /errors/notfound.html
ErrorDocument 500 /errors/serverr.html

Force download of specific files

<Files *.xls>
  ForceType application/octet-stream
  Header set Content-Disposition attachment
</Files>
<Files *.eps>
  ForceType application/octet-stream
  Header set Content-Disposition attachment
</Files>

Log PHP errors

# display no errs to user
php_flag display_startup_errors off
php_flag display_errors off
php_flag html_errors off
# log to file
php_flag log_errors on
php_value error_log /location/to/php_error.log

Remove file extensions from urls

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
# Replace html with your file extension, eg: php, htm, asp

Prevent directory listing

Options -Indexes

Reduce pages weight by compressing static data

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Automatically add utf-8 charset to files

<FilesMatch "\.(htm|html|css|js)$">
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
</FilesMatch>