• Redirects local /static/repository folder to external URL:

    Redirect permanent /static/repository https://kevin.deldycke.free.fr/repository

  • Hide Subversion and Git directories content (source):

    RedirectMatch 404 /\.(svn|git)(/|$)

  • Disable serving of PHP files coming from imported third party Javascript submodules (context):

    RedirectMatch 404 js-(.*)\.php$

  • Redirect any request to current year sub-directory (I used this for a yearly-updated static web page):

    RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule !^/2010/ /2010/ [R=301,L]

  • Force Apache to serve Python files as-is instead of being interpreted as CGI scripts:

    RemoveHandler .py

  • Same as above, but for PHP files:

    AddType text/plain .php

  • Here is my template for domain-based virtual host routing:

    # Setup the main website access
<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName example.com
  DocumentRoot /var/www/example
  # Add extra capabilities to let CMS like WordPress manage redirections
  <Directory /var/www/example>
    Options +FollowSymLinks +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
# Redirect all other access to the website from different domains to the canonical URL
<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.example.com
  ServerAlias *.example.com
  ServerAlias example.net *.example.net
  ServerAlias example.org *.example.org
  RedirectMatch permanent (.*) http://example.com$1
</VirtualHost>

  • Insert dynamic headers in HTTP responses depending on the browser:

    BrowserMatchNoCase ".*MSIE\s[1-6].*" IS_DISGUSTING_BROWSER
Header add X-advice-of-the-day "Save a kitten: use Firefox!" env=IS_DISGUSTING_BROWSER

  • Prevent WebDAV connexions (thanks Guillaume!):

    <Location />
  <Limit PROPFIND PROPPATCH MKCOL COPY MOVE LOCK UNLOCK PATCH>
    # Leaves GET (and HEAD), POST, PUT, DELETE, CONNECT, OPTIONS and TRACE alone
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
  </Limit>
</Location>
SetEnvIf Request_Method "OPTIONS" CLIENT_PROBE
Header set Allow "GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, CONNECT, OPTIONS, TRACE" env=CLIENT_PROBE

  • At work, we had to engineer a convoluted software architecture for our intranet to fit the network security policy of our customer. This had a bad side effect of letting the web statistic collector delete all cookies but its own, thus breaking intranet’s authentication. So we (thanks Matthieu!) came up with this unmaintainable hack on Apache side to hide our intranet’s cookies to Nedstat’s Javascript embedded code:

    <LocationMatch "/(.*)">
  LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so
  RequestHeader edit Cookie "(app_cookie_001=[^;]*(; )*)" ""
  RequestHeader edit Cookie "(app_cookie_002=[^;]*(; )*)" ""
  RequestHeader edit Cookie "(app_cookie_003=[^;]*(; )*)" ""
</LocationMatch>

  • Kill all apache processes and restart the service:

    1 $ /etc/init.d/apache2 stop ; pkill -9 -u www-data ; /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

  • Restart Apache service if no process found:

    1 $ [ `ps axu | grep -v "grep" | grep --count "www-data"` -le 0 ] && /etc/init.d/apache2 restart