| This seems to be what people think htaccess was meant for, but it is only part of the general use. We'll be getting into progressively more advanced stuff after this.
In order to specify your own ErrorDocuments, you need to be slightly familiar with the server returned error codes. (List to the right). You do not need to specify error pages for all of these, in fact you shouldn't. An ErrorDocument for code 200 would cause an infinite loop, whenever a page was found...this would not be good. In order to specify your own customized error documents, you simply need to add the following command, on one line, within your htaccess file:
You can name the pages anything you want (I'd recommend something that would prevent you from forgetting what the page is being used for), and you can place the error pages anywhere you want within your site, so long as they are web-accessible (through a URL). The initial slash in the directory location represents the root directory of your site, that being where your default page for your first-level domain is located. I typically prefer to keep them in a separate directory for maintenance purposes and in order to better control spiders indexing them through a ROBOTS.TXT file, but it is entirely up to you. If you were to use an error document handler for each of the error codes I mentioned, the .htaccess file would look like the following (note each command is on its own line):
You can also specify HTML, believe it or not!
The only time I use that HTML option is if I am feeling particularly saucy, since you can have so much more control over the error pages when used in conjunction with xSSI or CGI or both. Also note that the ErrorDocument starts with a " just before the HTML starts, but does not end with one...it shouldn't end with one and if you do use that option, keep it that way. And again, that should all be on one line, no naughty word wrapping! Next, we are moving on to password protection, that last frontier before I dunk you into the true capabilities of htaccess. If you are familiar with setting up your own password protected directories via htaccess, you may feel like skipping ahead. |
Successful Client Requests 200 OK 201 Created 202 Accepted 203 Non-Authorative Information 204 No Content 205 Reset Content 206 Partial Content Client Request Redirected 300 Multiple Choices 301 Moved Permanently 302 Moved Temporarily 303 See Other 304 Not Modified 305 Use Proxy Client Request Errors 400 Bad Request 401 Authorization Required 402 Payment Required (not used yet) 403 Forbidden 404 Not Found 405 Method Not Allowed 406 Not Acceptable (encoding) 407 Proxy Authentication Required 408 Request Timed Out 409 Conflicting Request 410 Gone 411 Content Length Required 412 Precondition Failed 413 Request Entity Too Long 414 Request URI Too Long 415 Unsupported Media Type Server Errors 500 Internal Server Error 501 Not Implemented 502 Bad Gateway 503 Service Unavailable 504 Gateway Timeout 505 HTTP Version Not Supported |
