Htaccess - Error Documents

Author: XEN
Filed Under Web Development |

I never regarded the ErrorDocument “feature” of htaccess as being useful, only because I hate confusion… and seeing different error pages for each website is very confusing, it gives you a headache.

However ErrorDocuments can be used wise in a busy article website, a good example would be redirecting users on a 404 page to pages related to the url. Or redirecting a wrong article request to the article’s directory. The only problem in this would be that the search engines will get 404, but the user would get a different page.

This is a list of status codes:
Successful Client Requests

200 - OK

201 - Accepted

202 - Accepted

203 - Non-Authorative Information

204 - No Content

205 - Reset Content

206 - Partial Content

Client Request Redirected

300 - Multiple Choices

301 - Moved Permanently

302 - Moved Temporarily

303 - See Other

304 - Not Modified

305 - Use Proxy

Client Request Errors

400 - Bad Request

401 - Authorization Required

402 - Payment Required (not used yet)

403 - Forbidden

404 - Not Found

405 - Method Not Allowed

406 - Not Acceptable (encoding)

407 - Proxy Authentication Required

408 - Request Timed Out

409 - Conflicting Request

410 - Gone

411 - Content Length Required

412 - Precondition Failed

413 - Request Entity Too Long

414 - Request URI Too Long

415 - Unsupported Media Type

Server Errors

500 - Internal Server Error

501 - Not Implemented

502 - Bad Gateway

503 - Service Unavailable

504 - Gateway Timeout

505 - HTTP Version Not Supported

Not all error codes should have error pages, some are more necessary than others. You should not create an error document for the 200 Status Code because this is the “OK” code, it tells the browser that the page is ok, creating a document for this status code would cause an infinite loop. Because the same status code is returned for the error document.

You can use html as the Error document, the html code needs to be all on one line (no word wraping) and the quotes only need to be placed on in front of the html, here’s an example:

ErrorDocument 404 "<b> Specified page was not found</b>.
<u>Please check the url and try again</u>

Tags: Apache, Coding, Errors, Htaccess, HTML, Web Server

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