Denying and allowing access to your wesbite can be accomplished very easily with .htaccess. Previously we have discussed how we can ban certain IP addresses from accessing our website by using a PHP script, however there is an even easier way to accomplish denying certain IP addresses access to your website, and that way is called .htaccess.

Ever wondered how Google makes some of their pages have the extension .g? This is a fairly easy procedure really, and htaccess does a great deal in helpin us accomplish this. First decide what you want the new extension to be, for our purposes we will use the extension of .next (simply because it makes sense). Now we want all files with the .next extension to be treated as PHP files, so we will add the following line to our .htaccess file: AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .dbo

Before you can start using any htaccess commands and functions, it is important to know how to create a .htaccess file. Suprisingly this actually causes lots of people problems. Most Operating Systems, Windows in particular, will not accept the file name .htaccess when you go to try to save the document. This error seems to have been fixed in Windows XP SP2, however certain people still seem to come upon errors when saving in this format. If you are encountering errors with saving your .htaccess file, go ahead and save your file as htaccess.txt. Then upload the file to your web server using your favorite FTP program. Once your file is on the server go ahead and rename the file to .htaccess.

One of the most common uses for .htaccess, not counting custom error pages, is to use it for redirecting. By using .htaccess you can redirect a users request to a whole other file, or even better, a whole other website, and all instantly. Lets take a look at the command we use to accomplish this: Redirect /folder/sub_folder/page.php http://www.somesite.com/folder/page.php In the above example, everytime a user sends a request to the server asking to access the file page.php, which is stored in folder/sub_folder, the server will reply with the url to the new website (www.somesite.com in this case). This all happens within milliseconds, so the user doesn't notice anything except for a different address in his address bar.

Most web hosts setup your account to use a specifc file as the index file. In most cases this is either index.html, index.php, index.htm or defualt.html, but what happens if you dont want to use any of those names for your index file? What if you want your index file to be called thestart.php (for example). Well once again we can use .htaccess to help us out. We use the DirectoryIndex command and then create a list of the index files we will be using throughout the site. The server will work from left to right, checking to see if each file exists, if none of them exisit it will display a directory listing (unless, of course, you have turned this off).

Ever wanted to stop someone getting on your site? And you somehow fount out their IP address? Well here's how using the .htaccess file technique.

Redirection using htaccess, very effective for when you have renamed files and want users to be immediately forwarded, or want to do domain forwarding.

One of the most common uses for a .htaccess file is to create custom error pages. The Apache server comes pre-installed with several different error pages, the problem with them is that they are quite frankly.... ugly. In order to use custom error pages we just need to add the following line(s) to our .htaccess file: ErrorDocument errornumber /errorfile.extension

Sometimes you need to put important but secret data on a web site. Then it's important to protect it from other persons! Let's say your web stats, your admin section or just your private photo album.

One of the more powerful tricks of the .htaccess hacker is the ability to rewrite URLs. This enables us to do some mighty manipulations on our links; useful stuff like transforming very long URL's into short, cute URLs, transforming dynamic ?generated=page&URL's into /friendly/flat/links, redirect missing pages, preventing hot-linking, performing automatic language translation, and much, much more.