Question

I want to disable access to any file OR directory, whose name begins with a DOT. I came up with the following, but it disables access to files/directories beginning with DOT only if they are directly in the Document root.

<Files ~ "^\.|\/\.">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
</Files>

With this,

http://my_server.com/.svn/entries   --> Permission denied
http://my_server.com/abcd/.svn/entries  --> Accessible, should be disabled

Whats the proper regex to achieve this?

Answer 1

You code does not work because <Files> only applies to the basename of the requested document. That is, the part after the last slash. (source: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/core.html#files)

Apache blocks .htaccess files in a default installation (better: all files starting with .ht). If you looked closely at the configuration files, you would see something like this:

<FilesMatch "^\.ht">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

So to hide all files starting with a dot, you would use:

<FilesMatch "^\.">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

In order to make it work for directories starting with a dot, use the following (tested) code:

<DirectoryMatch "^\.|\/\.">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
</DirectoryMatch>