[TuT] Custom Error Pages with Apache

Welcome to my first Coders Paradise guide. This is about creating custom error pages with Apache.

Information about Status Codes: HTTP/1.1: Status Code Definitions


In this tutorial I will be showing you how to be creating error pages for the following: 400, 401, 403, 404, 500.
You can find what these mean at second post. ;)

10.4.1 400 Bad Request
10.4.2 401 Unauthorized
10.4.4 403 Forbidden
10.4.5 404 Not Found
10.5.1 500 Internal Server Error

Now, we simply create a file .htaccess (I have uploaded it in a .zip since Windows can not create one by default.

Now, open it up and enter the following lines:

Code:

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ErrorDocument 400 http://www.domain.com/error.php
ErrorDocument 401 http://www.domain.com/error.php
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.domain.com/error.php
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.domain.com/error.php
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.domain.com/error.php

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Changing the domain and the error.php to what you what your domain is.

Now simply upload it to your host, and now when someone visits a page that cannot be found for example (404) they will get the error page you created!

Neat huh!

Comments and questions are welcome.

10.4.1 400 Bad Request

The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The client SHOULD NOT repeat the request without modifications.

10.4.2 401 Unauthorized

The request requires user authentication. The response MUST include a WWW-Authenticate header field (section 14.47) containing a challenge applicable to the requested resource. The client MAY repeat the request with a suitable Authorization header field (section 14.8). If the request already included Authorization credentials, then the 401 response indicates that authorization has been refused for those credentials. If the 401 response contains the same challenge as the prior response, and the user agent has already attempted authentication at least once, then the user SHOULD be presented the entity that was given in the response, since that entity might include relevant diagnostic information. HTTP access authentication is explained in "HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication"

10.4.4 403 Forbidden

The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated. If the request method was not HEAD and the server wishes to make public why the request has not been fulfilled, it SHOULD describe the reason for the refusal in the entity. If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 404 (Not Found) can be used instead.

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address. This status code is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.

10.5.1 500 Internal Server Error

The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.

What revision of the HTTP spec are you reading from?

Because you forgot these :wink:

10.4.6 405 Method Not Allowed
The method specified in the Request-Line is not allowed for the resource identified by the Request-URI. The response MUST include an Allow header containing a list of valid methods for the requested resource.

10.4.7 406 Not Acceptable
The resource identified by the request is only capable of generating response entities which have content characteristics not acceptable according to the accept headers sent in the request.

Unless it was a HEAD request, the response SHOULD include an entity containing a list of available entity characteristics and location(s) from which the user or user agent can choose the one most appropriate. The entity format is specified by the media type given in the Content-Type header field. Depending upon the format and the capabilities of the user agent, selection of the most appropriate choice MAY be performed automatically. However, this specification does not define any standard for such automatic selection.

Note: HTTP/1.1 servers are allowed to return responses which are
not acceptable according to the accept headers sent in the
request. In some cases, this may even be preferable to sending a
406 response. User agents are encouraged to inspect the headers of
an incoming response to determine if it is acceptable.
If the response could be unacceptable, a user agent SHOULD temporarily stop receipt of more data and query the user for a decision on further actions.

10.4.8 407 Proxy Authentication Required
This code is similar to 401 (Unauthorized), but indicates that the client must first authenticate itself with the proxy. The proxy MUST return a Proxy-Authenticate header field (section 14.33) containing a challenge applicable to the proxy for the requested resource. The client MAY repeat the request with a suitable Proxy-Authorization header field (section 14.34). HTTP access authentication is explained in "HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication" [43].

10.4.9 408 Request Timeout
The client did not produce a request within the time that the server was prepared to wait. The client MAY repeat the request without modifications at any later time.

10.4.10 409 Conflict
The request could not be completed due to a conflict with the current state of the resource. This code is only allowed in situations where it is expected that the user might be able to resolve the conflict and resubmit the request. The response body SHOULD include enough

information for the user to recognize the source of the conflict. Ideally, the response entity would include enough information for the user or user agent to fix the problem; however, that might not be possible and is not required.

Conflicts are most likely to occur in response to a PUT request. For example, if versioning were being used and the entity being PUT included changes to a resource which conflict with those made by an earlier (third-party) request, the server might use the 409 response to indicate that it can't complete the request. In this case, the response entity would likely contain a list of the differences between the two versions in a format defined by the response Content-Type.

10.4.11 410 Gone
The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know, or has no facility to determine, whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) SHOULD be used instead. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

The 410 response is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed. Such an event is common for limited-time, promotional services and for resources belonging to individuals no longer working at the server's site. It is not necessary to mark all permanently unavailable resources as "gone" or to keep the mark for any length of time -- that is left to the discretion of the server owner.

10.4.12 411 Length Required
The server refuses to accept the request without a defined Content- Length. The client MAY repeat the request if it adds a valid Content-Length header field containing the length of the message-body in the request message.

10.4.13 412 Precondition Failed
The precondition given in one or more of the request-header fields evaluated to false when it was tested on the server. This response code allows the client to place preconditions on the current resource metainformation (header field data) and thus prevent the requested method from being applied to a resource other than the one intended.

10.4.14 413 Request Entity Too Large
The server is refusing to process a request because the request entity is larger than the server is willing or able to process. The server MAY close the connection to prevent the client from continuing the request.

If the condition is temporary, the server SHOULD include a Retry- After header field to indicate that it is temporary and after what time the client MAY try again.

10.4.15 414 Request-URI Too Long
The server is refusing to service the request because the Request-URI is longer than the server is willing to interpret. This rare condition is only likely to occur when a client has improperly converted a POST request to a GET request with long query information, when the client has descended into a URI "black hole" of redirection (e.g., a redirected URI prefix that points to a suffix of itself), or when the server is under attack by a client attempting to exploit security holes present in some servers using fixed-length buffers for reading or manipulating the Request-URI.

10.4.16 415 Unsupported Media Type
The server is refusing to service the request because the entity of the request is in a format not supported by the requested resource for the requested method.

10.4.17 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable
A server SHOULD return a response with this status code if a request included a Range request-header field (section 14.35), and none of the range-specifier values in this field overlap the current extent of the selected resource, and the request did not include an If-Range request-header field. (For byte-ranges, this means that the first- byte-pos of all of the byte-range-spec values were greater than the current length of the selected resource.)

When this status code is returned for a byte-range request, the response SHOULD include a Content-Range entity-header field specifying the current length of the selected resource (see section 14.16). This response MUST NOT use the multipart/byteranges content- type.

10.4.18 417 Expectation Failed
The expectation given in an Expect request-header field (see section 14.20) could not be met by this server, or, if the server is a proxy, the server has unambiguous evidence that the request could not be met by the next-hop server.

Just wanted to cover the basic ones. :P

lmao owned. =P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shaneypoo

lmao owned. =P

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uhm....no? Anyway, thats quite a nice tut, you should pm it to sipher, so he can put it in the mega-tutorials thread.