Question

Description:

I often run into this problem when I have a website located in /var/www/ that grows way too large, and decide to move, essentially all of it, to /var/www/main_files. Simply putting a symbolic link /var/www/index.html pointing to /var/www/main_files/index.html does not work. I believe the reason it does not work is because the index.html file is still be “executed” in the directory of the symbolic link (/var/www). Therefore, any files which need to be included/fetched, will no longer have the correct paths.

One could change the VHost directory to /var/www/main_files, but that is too permanent. I may still want to have a few files in /var/www. I could also go through and manually change any file paths in the actual html/php/js files, but that is not only too permanent, it is painstakingly slow.

Question:

Is there a way, short of using mod_rewrite (which, again, is too permanent), to instruct Apache to follow symbolic links (assume symlinks are all within docroot) and, when the user goes to http://www.example.com/index.html, load the web page as if the user had gone to http://www.example.com/main_files/index.html? If not, then what other options should I consider?

Motivation:

I most often run into this problem when I want to debug a site, and I quickly download a free template (ie download this one). Most of these templates have all their files in the top folder, making it very messy to dump it all to /var/www, especially with more than one template. What I want is to make a subfolder for the template, but still be able to load it from http://www.example.com/index.html, not explicitly from http://www.example.com/template1/index.html

Answer 1

The instruction to follow symlinks is not part of the mod_rewrite, but is in the core of Apache

To enable the feature you must add FollowSymLinks to the Options directive:

  <Directory /usr/local/httpd/htdocs>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
  </Directory>

See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html directive.