Daily Bitekletas

Because slow adoption rate of PHP 5 especially among web hosting companies and developers, a number of open source projects and teams have put up an initiative called GoPHP5 to finally mark a due date to stop support PHP4 effective February 5th 2008. After the said date, any new releases of well known open source software will require at least PHP 5.2.0. Major web hosting companies have also agreed to include PHP 5.2.0 as part of their service offering. This is really a bold move and certainly will benefit developers and end-users. PHP4 has done a great job for quite a long time already. It is time to exploit the advanced capability of PHP5, besides PHP6 is just around the corner..

I just need to write something about this since I’ve been a victim of configuration overload lately. While I was setting up a demo site for a client, I kept of wondering why the site is not functioning properly. All RewriteRule entries are being ignored by Apache.

The idea that Apache may not be allowing .htaccess didn’t come to my mind at first. I deliberately put in invalid characters inside the .htaccess file hoping that Apache would throw in some server error message but it did not! Then I remember the keyword AllowOverride None. Aparently, this is the default setting in Apache (so don’t mess with it!). I had to put a custom setting for a specific directory in order for .htaccess to work. Here is a sample configuration on how to allow .htaccess to specific directory (assuming your files are in /var/www/sitea).

<Directory /var/www/sitea>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

AllowOverride can accept other values (except none) for fine-grain control. It can be embedded inside a <VirtualHost></VirtualHost> for specific needs (which I did) or just put it along with other global entries. Now .htaccess should work without a hitch!

This is only applicable to individual that has a superuser access to a system.