How not to lose 15 minutes

Another geeky one? Although it’s light, this post deals with Apache, and PHP, and htaccess files. So anyone with a brain, go away. You have been warned.

When setting up a vhost for Apache 2, under your homedir, the following thing is explained very clearly in the official documentation:

Further note that Apache must look for .htaccess files in all higher-level directories, in order to have a full complement of directives that it must apply. (See section on how directives are applied.) Thus, if a file is requested out of a directory /www/htdocs/example, Apache must look for the following files:

/.htaccess

/www/.htaccess

/www/htdocs/.htaccess

/www/htdocs/example/.htaccess

That is to say: when you setup an application under $HOME/src/foo/bar/baz, and do not understand why (the fuck) Apache complains it can’t read e.g. the file $HOME/src/.htaccess, that’s because of the quoted statement above. The quickest fix is to just chmod your way up the parent directories so that your web server user can at least read them.

… Isn’t that ugly? I guess for a laptop/dev env it’s okay-ish. Although, I should probably remove the htaccess file and have directives placed in Apache’s vhost configuration. As to why I’m using Apache and not something lighter, it is because of a PHP project, and the inability of our client’s tech team to grasp the concept of FastCGI… in spite of our efforts as I’ve been told, but they won’t let me try my good’ol’ chainsaw Rusty. Aah those sales guys…