Question

I’m using .htaccess and mod_rewrite to point to files that reside behind the DocumentRoot. My folder structure looks like this:

home/     webroot/     other_files/ 

I have a .htaccess file in webroot with the following content:

 RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /home/other_files/$1 

If I try to access http://example.com/file.html I receive the following error:

The requested URL /home/other_files/file.html was not found on this server.

Is it even possible to load files that are behind the DocumentRoot? If so, can someone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

I believe you need to add a section with

<Directory '/home/other_files'>   (options) </Directory> 

to your server configuration before apache will be able to serve anything from it. For an example, my DocumentRoot is /var/www but there is this section in the default available site:

Alias /doc/ '/usr/share/doc/' <Directory '/usr/share/doc/'>     Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks     AllowOverride None     Order deny,allow     Deny from all     Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128 </Directory> 

You could then rewrite a URL to go to /doc/ and the server would know where to get the files from.