Question

I have a website setup in my /httpdocs directory with it’s own htaccess and I have a wordpress blog within /httpdocs/blog, using the standard wordpress htaccess

I keep seeing the following error in my apache error log:

[error] [client #.#.#.#] Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: /var/www/vhosts/somedomain.com/httpdocs/blog/index.pl

I added “Options +FollowSymLinks” as this seems to have fixed the problem for others (but not me)

The main .htaccess is as follows:

The WordPress .htaccess is:

Options +FollowSymLinks
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPres

I am also wondering why the error is reported as “index.pl” since there are no perl scripts in /blog. So, after some searching, I found an httpd.include file (plesk generated) in the /var/www/vhosts/somedomain/conf/ which contains some perl handler stuff:

SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler ModPerl::Registry
Options ExecCGI
allow from all
PerlSendHeader On

If I remove perl support via Plesk, thus removing the above block of code, then I don’t get errors anymore.

The obvious answer would be to disable perl as I don’t need it, however there must be a way to fix this error without having to do that?

Answer 1

add to .htaccess

Options FollowSymLinks

all done 🙂