Using Mod Rewrite & Other htaccess Related Tips

This tutorial/tips list is going to look at some of the extremely useful things your htaccess file can be used for. From Mod Rewrite & Mod Security to altering your PHP.ini on the fly the possibilities are pretty much endless, so to help out here are some of the ones I use myself & have found to be the most useful.

Mod Rewrite

Some find the syntax very, very difficult to learn (me included), but Mod Rewrite is extremely useful for various things. The most useful usage I have come across is to redirect people to a nice maintenance page when you need to do some maintenance to your website. I even use this one myself for the very rare occasions I have to close the site for technical reasons.

Redirecting To A Maintenance Page

Replace the 000.000.000.000 with your current IP address, make a folder in the root of your website called ‘maintenance’, put a html or php file called index in there with a message on and you are done. Entering your IP address will allow you into your website (so you can perform the maintenance) while redirecting everyone else. When you have finished your maintenance just comment the code out & you can use it again at any time. To comment it out just do this:

You can even add a comment like I have to remind you what the code does.

Blocking An IP

It’s sad, but sometimes a user of an IP address decides to abuse your website and cause you a lot of problems. What can you do? Well you can use the powerful Mod Rewrite to block an IP address. Rather than blocking it it actually just tells your server to send it somewhere else. I wouldn’t advise using this method, but it can be useful for other reasons. I’ll cover a more advisable way of blocking IP’s later.

That will redirect the IP you enter in place of 000.000.000.000 to Google. However, as I said before, I wouldn’t advise using it.

Other Uses For htaccess

There are other things you can do in your htaccess file. One of the most common is to stop index listing. You know the white screen you sometimes see that lists all the files in a directory. That can be a huge security violation. So here is the easy way to stop it:

Some hosts automatically turn it off, but it doesn’t hurt to make sure.

Blocking An IP Address Revisit

I showed before how to block, well actually more redirect, an IP address that is abusing your site. Well here is how to actually block one:

You can list as many as you want, or if you replace a set of numbers with an asterisk (*) you can block a range of IP addresses. IP addresses that are blocked in this way will receive a HTTP 403 forbidden. To let those IP’s you have blocked know that they’ve been blocked you might want to use the following tip too.

Custom HTTP Error Pages

As I said to let those pesky IP addresses know you have blocked them for abuse, you can use a custom 403 error page. They work on a large number of hosts which have support for Mod Rewrite enabled, but you will need to check. To see if it works just place the code in your htaccess file & refresh, if you get a 500 error then your host probably doesn’t support them. It’s really simple:

Just replace the /403.html with the path, from root, that you want the error to load. You can use it for any HTTP error code. Just replace the 403 with another, like 500, or even 404.

I hope this look at some of my favorite Mod Rewrite & htaccess related tips has helped you. If you have any questions let me know, or you can follow me on Twitter by clicking the big blue birds in the sidebar.

htaccessIP BlockMaintenanceMod Rewrite