More than password protection, htaccess has you covered

Accessory

Article from ADMIN 08/2012

By Chris Binnie

In addition to introducing extra security measures, htaccess lets you add some fantastic features to your website without having superuser access to the main configuration files of the web server.

Hark back to those halcyon days when the GIF89a and the blink tag ruled the web page and the most common use of htaccess on the nascent Apache HTTP Server was password protecting a directory. As you can imagine, now that Apache's feature set has grown significantly richer, you have a host of useful ways to use htaccess.

More recently, htaccess has gained popularity as a conduit to mod_rewrite, where it has been used to create aesthetically pleasing (and as a result, search engine-friendly) URLs so that, for example, a URL such as domainname.com/directory-name/filename.html might become simply domainname.com/filename .

Such URLs usually are not only a little shorter to link to but easier to remember and, most importantly, are highly relevant to search engine indexing because, currently, significant weighting is put on the keyword content of URLs.

Another use that appealed to my sense of simplicity is the use of htaccess for redirecting short URLs to long ones. That might seem slightly counterintuitive, but before I look a little closer at that application of htaccess, I'll run through some other practical examples.

One 2011 study shows that the behemoth that is Apache is running more than 60% of websites on the Internet, comfortably surpassing the mark of 100 million websites some time ago, so I hope you'll find that these examples are applicable to a multitude of scenarios.

Myths and Folklore

A common misconception is that .htaccess files are needed for password protection, but apparently anything you can add to a local .htaccess file within a directory can also be added to the main Apache configuration file.

The purpose of local .htaccess files is to allow certain Apache configuration changes to be made by a non-privileged user who doesn't have access to the configuration file of a virtual host.

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