Question

My main question is, for security reasons, I’d like to know if it’s possible to virtually change the name (in a sense) of a website file using .htaccess. For instance, if I have a file /index.php and I want to make it such that calls for /mysite are redirected to /index.php, but I also want calls to /index.php to return as either an error 403 or 404. Is this possible? And if so, how could it be done?

Also, I’ve been searching for a full documentation on the .htaccess directive syntax, but I couldn’t find anything. My second question is, Does anyone know of a good generic reference of all the directives and their syntax? (I couldn’t even find one in w3schools)

Answer 1

First I’ll start by saying w3schools doesn’t have particularly good references for anything. The Apache mod_rewrite documentation is really good, and I always go there first.

The first part of your request is pretty straightforward as a rewrite. But before we get there, let’s start by preventing direct requests to index.php. In order to do this without messing up our other rules we will use the %{THE_REQUEST} variable to match index.php and forbid access.

RewriteEngine On

# If the request sent by the browser includes index.php...
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} index\.php
# forbid access (403)
RewriteRule ^. - [F]

# Then you just need a generic rule to rewrite /mysite into index.php
RewriteRule ^mysite index.php [L]

We need the first part using THE_REQUEST to avoid causing conflicts with the second part rewriting into index.php.

If you want to serve a 404 to make it look like index.php doesn’t even exist, replace the [F] with [R=404,L]