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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T07:04:01+00:00

I have a strange behavior on my server or on my staging server, we

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I have a strange behavior on my server or on my staging server, we need to see where is the actual problem. Here is some well known code from the popular WordPress CMS:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php

The only difference with the original code is the added “AddHandler” at the end of the file which is required on our staging hosting provider.

The real issue is that i can access files at the following dummy urls on my development server (internal Ubuntu based 12.04 standard server) and not in production or staging (which are both the same server).

  1. /wp-content/test.php
  2. /wp-content/themes/test.php
  3. /wp-content/themes/wpactivis/test.php
  4. /wp-content/themes/wpactivis/_/test.php
  5. /wp-content/themes/wpactivis/_/ajax/test.php

Now on one set of servers, these urls return a 404 and WordPress seems to kick in automaticaly while on our dev server, 200 OK and the file content is return which is the classic “Hello world” test…

Can any htaccess guru tell me what should be the real behavior of the code pasted, should it be like the staging servers or the development server.

I tend to think it should be like the development server, any file access or directory access should be granted and not return a 404 because of the :

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

conditions!

Thank you

NOTE: Don’t tell me it’s a bad way to code wordpress or stuff like that i don’t want to hear that. We have a completely secure setup and the fact that files could be accessed directly into my plugins or themes directory is irrelevant. Tons of similar questions are posted on the web but no answer, only people saying you should do that. What i’m trying here is to get an answer as to why it is doing that on one server and not the other.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Never mind, the hoster found the problem but i’ll answer it so other people can actually rely on it.

    Our hoster uses a CPanel based installation with a module that prevents serving files that are group writable.

    To migrate sites from development to staging we have chosen the “BackupBuddy” solution which is a pretty good solution for small wordpress site deployment… Problem? It extracts the files under 775. This led us to have issues with the servicing of the ajax files of our WordPress install.

    To fix this, if you have SSH access to your server, juste recursively change the permissions to 755 for directories and 644 for files using:

    find . -type f -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type d -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;

    Good luck, i hope this helps other people.

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