Category: Apache

Frequently when our clients upgrade their website, they will need URLs from the old site mapped to the new site. So for example maybe they had this URL on the old server: http://acme.com/widgets/egonomic-widget-design Maybe there are many sites on the Internet that link to this URL so they don’t want it to return a 404 error. Instead they want it to redirect to the new address of the article at: http://acme.com/smallwidgets/designing-egonomic-widgets This can be accomplished with a simple rewrite rule in the .htaccess file like this: RewriteEngine On Rewriterule ^widgets\/egonomic-widget-design$ http://acme.com/smallwidgets/designing-egonomic-widgets [R=permanent,L] Note that the RewriteRule should be on one line in the file … not wrapped over two lines. The pattern for the rewrite rule is:

Also notice that in the source pattern we escaped the slash (/) with a backslash (\). This is necessary since the slash has special meaning in a regular expression. In the above

Recently we’ve seen servers being overloaded by the 80legs.com web crawler. Here’s a quick rewrite rule that can be placed in .htaccess to block 80legs:

Here’s a rule to block by user agent with Nginx:

By default many Apache RPM packages do not set the httpd server to start automatically on boot so this needs to be done manually. On RedHat/CentOS the chkconfig command should be used as follows:

There are numerous ways to organize your Apache configuration files. In some cases this organization will be dictated by your Linux distribution or control panel choice. When I’m working on RedHat/CentOS with no control panel here’s what I have found to be a good organization: Minimize changes to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. It’s easier to upgrade or migrate if this file has few or not changes. Place virtual host definitions in /etc/httpd/conf/vhosts.conf. Put the document root for each website at /var/www/vhosts/[domain name]/httpdocs. Do not include “www” on the domain name. For example with “acme.com” the document root would be /var/www/vhosts/acme.com/httpdocs. Here’s a template for the virtual host definition:

Of course the SSL portion of the template is optional.