Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 22 LEOPARD AS A WEB SERVER
One thing to keep in mind is that there are permissions entries for every known directory,
including the document root. If you change a directory elsewhere in the configuration, you will
have to be sure to change its permissions entry as well. This is one of the reasons why using symbolic
links is easier than editing the configuration file.
DirectoryIndex
Easily missed amidst all the permissions directives, the DirectoryIndex directive defines the
default index file name. That is to say, when a user simply points to a directory, which file do
they get? The default is index.html, which is why you don’t have to type index.html all the time
when you’re surfing the Web.
If you decide to start using PHP or some other technology that requires you to use a different
file name or extension, you can edit this. By including multiple listings, you can give several
possible defaults. Apache will server up the first one it finds. For example, to serve index.html by
default, but to serve the old Microsoft FrontPage standard, welcome.html, as a backup, you would
say the following:
DirectoryIndex index.html welcome.html
If nothing listed in DirectoryIndex exists, visitors will see a listing of everything in the directory.
To prevent that, you can put a failsafe at the end of the DirectoryIndex directive, such as a
reference to a file in your root directory telling people to stop poking around in your directories:
DirectoryIndex index.html welcome.html /lost.html
Logging
There are several directives related to logging. You can customize where logs are kept, how much
logging Apache should do, and what format log messages are in. These are best kept to the
default values, but if you spend a lot of time reading your logs and you develop an opinion on
some aspect of logging, here is where you can flex your will.
Redirects
Much like the DocumentRoot directive, the Redirect, Alias, and ScriptAlias directives let you
map the URLs people request to your file system.
Redirect will actually cause the browser to request a new location. This is useful if you’ve
permanently moved a file to elsewhere on the system. Alias will cause a given path to look outside
the normal document root hierarchy.
For example, you might want to give the outside world access to your Pictures directory
(for some reason) by mapping requests to www.yoursite.com/pictures to /Users/username/Pictures.
You could, of course, also accomplish this with symbolic links, assuming you allow FollowSym-
Links on the directory.
ScriptAlias is like Alias, but it applies specifically to directories that contain executable
scripts, rather than simple documents.
DefaultType
Most of the Internet uses MIME types to determine how it should deal with files. Since most web
servers serve web pages, it’s appropriate to leave this set to the default, text/plain.
NOTE MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. Like most of the Internet, it
has been expanded beyond its original purpose.