.htaccess

.htaccess tips and tricks

Important Notes

This article was originally posted here. For simplicity and readability, some figures and paragraphs are not included in this wiki note.

Introduction

This work in constant progress is some collected wisdom, stuff I've learned on the topic of .htaccess hacking, commands I've used successfully in the past, on a variety of server setups, and in most cases still do. You may have to tweak the examples some to get the desired result, though, and a reliable test server is a powerful ally, preferably one with a very similar setup to your "live" server. Okay, to begin..

There's a good reason why you won't see .htaccess files on the web; almost every web server in the world is configured to ignore them, by default. Same goes for most operating systems. Mainly it's the dot "." at the start, you see?

If you don't see, you'll need to disable your operating system's invisible file functions, or use a text editor that allows you to open hidden files, something like bbedit on the Mac platform. On windows, showing invisibles in explorer should allow any text editor to open them, and most decent editors to save them too**. Linux dudes know how to find them without any help from me.

【NB】Even notepad can save files beginning with a dot, if you put double-quotes around the name when you save it; i.e.. ".htaccess". You can also use your ftp client to rename files beginning with a dot, even on your local filesystem; works great in FileZilla.