You need to restart your Apache server when you change settings in php.in, httpd.conf  or some other config file. You need to restart the server because the changes which you made will only effect after the restart.

To restart your server, simply type the following command in your shell.

;type the following command in your shell
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Hope that helps.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Related posts:

1. How to make shell or sh , bin file executable in ubuntu
2. Change default php.ini values using .htaccess
3. Transfer database from one host to other using mysqldump and shell

As you might be knowing that php.ini is the configuration file for the PHP and resides at the server. It contains all the options/settings for the PHP language. There are instances you need to change these options. In local environment you can change these settings very easily but when on remote server you do not have permission to edit/change this file.

Before you can overwrite the php.ini values, you need to have the following two lines present at the top of your .htaccess file to make the changes work.

AllowOverride Options
AllowOverride All

Following is the way to set values in php.ini using .htaccess. For example if you want to enable PHP error log and turn on the error display using .htaccess you will need to write the following in your .htaccess file.

php_flag display_errors On
php_flag log_errors On

There are two kind of directives which can be set in .htaccess. php_value for the string type of values and php_flag for the boolean values. In the above example we used later to set the errors on which is a boolean value. An example to set php_value  would be to change the default memory limit and default post size.

php_value post_max_size 8M
php_value memory_limit 32M

You can change the values of various options listed in php.ini via .htaccess. Hope this helps.

Stay Digified !!

Sachin Khosla

Related posts:

1. Using .htaccess for day to day work | Part 2
2. Using .htaccess for day to day work
3. Google Chrome : Change default download location

Well the theory part is over and here is the code which you need to copy paste to the .htaccess file which should be present in your root folder. This rule is independent of any sorta wordpress or CMS install. But please make sure you make the changes after taking backup, because if you set wrong rules or conditions in .htaccess then you may end up messing up your site’s URL structures and hence loss of visitors.

Code to be copied when your prefered domain is http://www.domain.com

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Code to be copied when your prefered domain is http://domain.com

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301, L]

Hope this helps anyone, there is also a PHP solution available, its easy but I really do not want visitors to go for it, but still in case you do not have access to .htaccess or something, lemme know i can write it down in comment later..

Cheers!!
Sachin Khosla

Related posts:

1. Moving your wordpress blog from one domain to other
2. Using .htaccess for day to day work | Part 2
3. Advanced htaccess for more than 10 group of backtrack references

Problem :

RewriteRule ^tools/chart(/id_([^\/]+))?(/user_([A-Za-z0-9_]+))?(/action_([A-Za-z0-9_]+))?(/date_([A-Za-z0-9_]+))?(/service_([A-Za-z0-9_]+))?(/.+)$ my_php_file.php?id=$2&user=$4&action=$6&date=$8&service=$10&message=$12

Apache’s official website says:
Back-references are identifiers of the form $N (N=0..9), which will be replaced by the contents of the Nth group of the matched Pattern.
In the above RewriteRule, the variables $10 and $11 will return 0 and 1 as values respectively. Now let us look at the workaround to this probelm.

Solution :

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /(service_([A-Za-z0-9_]+))?(/.+)$
RewriteRule ^tools/chart(/id_([^\/]+))?(/user_([A-Za-z0-9_]+))?(/action_([A-Za-z0-9_]+))?(/date_([A-Za-z0-9_]+))?(/service_([A-Za-z0-9_]+))?(/.+)$ my_php_file.php?id=$2&user=$4&action=$6&date=$8&service=%2&message=%3

Using the above RewriteCond and RewriteRule we can grab the values of the group after 9.

Hope this helps

Cheers!!
Realin !

Related posts:

1. Prefix www to your domain using htaccess
2. Change default php.ini values using .htaccess
3. Using .htaccess for day to day work | Part 2

Handling Document process errors

There are many times, when a bad request is sent to the server by the client and user is sent 404 page not found code as a response. Being a webmaster, you would like to retain your user on your site and show him the correct way by suggesting him search page or a customized error page. You can redirect your user to different pages according to different error codes. For example the following code

ErrorDocument 404 /errors/custom_error.html

Adding Mime Types to your server

There are times when your server doesnt support certain mime types. This happens especially in case of mp3,swf etc. You can do so by adding this line to ur .htaccess file.

AddType application/x-shockwave-flash swf

AddType is specifying that you are adding a MIME type. The application string is the actual parameter of the MIME you are adding, and the final little bit is the default extension for the MIME type you just added, in our example this is swf for ShockWave File.

There is a neat trick here, to force a file to be downloaded, via the Save As browser feature. You can simply set a MIME type to application/octet-stream and that immediately prompts you for the download.

Hot Link Protection

Protecting bandwidth of your server and resources like images is a real pain at times. There are lots of sites which link up images used on your site to theirs. To protect against such theft, you put the following code into your .htaccess. You need to change domain.com to your actual domain.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|js|css)$ - [F]

Put this code into .htaccess present at root or any subdirectory. This will protect the images of type gif and jpg where as javascript files and CSS as well.

Will write up few more tweaks, keep reading

Cheers !!

Realin !

Related posts:

1. Using .htaccess for day to day work
2. Prefix www to your domain using htaccess
3. Change default php.ini values using .htaccess

Workarea for .htaccess

If we place .htaccess file into the root of our website then all the folder and subfolders will be affected by the rules written in it. But if the subfolder or folders have their own .htaccess file (may be empty) then the first preference is given to it. So the preference is for the nearest .htaccess file.

I will now list some of the basic .htaccess techniques which can be used to makea programmer’s life easy.

Redirect Url

Redirect /mydir/oldfile.html http://mydomain.com/newdir/newfile.html

Stop Indexing a directory

Yes this is one the tedious task which every programmer has to do. So that the file are not indexed when a directory may get called from browsers. A simple one line rule can make your life easy.

Options -Indexes

Chanding the index page of the directory

We all know that by default Apache looks for the file index.html in a directory when it gets a request from the client. What if we want to change the index file, i may want my index.php to be parsed and send to the client as a response. Then i can simply write the following rule in .htaccess

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

The priority decreases from left to right

Adding SSI Support to the server

Many people want to use SSI (Server Side Includes) but their web hosting providers doesn’t seem to give support on that. Well no worries, .htaccess have got an answer for the desperadoes

 
AddType text/html shtml
 
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
 
you may also want to change the default index file, this can be done using
 
DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html

A quick explanation would be, that the first line adds the type of extension and second line ask the file of the type shtml to be parsed on the server side. Third line is not always mandatory as long as your server has enabled it. FolloWSymLinks is basically tells apache to follow the real file if it finds a link to the real file in the specified directory.

Block Users based on IP address

There are times when you want to block certain users or certain range of IP address to be blocked, so that they cannot access your website or pages/dirs/. This can be done using the following code.

 
order allow,deny
 
deny from 122.123.111.34
 
deny from 122.123.111.23
 
allow from all

The First Line defines the three phase parsing of apache. It is not necessary to define this here but still a quick definition would be , order allows to parse the allow directives first then deny conditions and then the conditions which do not match both of them and then sends back the response to the client. Second line denies the access from the given IP, Third line is similar to second, while fourth line allows everyone else to access.

We could also write

 deny from all

to block everyone to access the given directory on apache.

Well guys, will write more of these snippets very soon.

Gotta go now

Cheers !!

Realin !

Related posts:

1. Using .htaccess for day to day work | Part 2
2. Change default php.ini values using .htaccess
3. Advanced htaccess for more than 10 group of backtrack references