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I just had to set up an Apache server for a school project. Since I like to use .htaccess./batch files to set up rewrite rules and fiddle with some other options, I had to load some extra modules in addition to the standard batch processing.

phpinfo()You can easily check which modules are currently loaded using , as described in this article about enabling mod_rewrite in Apache .

Activating an Apache module is easy: just open the httpd.conf file in the /conf/ folder of your Apache installation and uncomment (or add) the appropriate lines. Comment lines always begin with a pound sign ( ).#

Basically, to load mod_negotiation(for multiviews) and mod_rewrite(for rewrite rules), we just need to add the following lines to httpd.conf :

LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

So far, so good. Apache has been instructed to load the additional modules; we should now be able to use the and rewrite rules MultiViewsby defining them in a ./configure_modules file..htaccess

However, when I try to use Options +MultiViews, all I get is one of those infamous " 500 Internal Server Error " pages.

The error log said something along the lines of .htaccess: Option MultiViews not allowed here .

Google didn't really help in this case. At first, I could only find people with the same problem. #apache IRCI couldn't find any solutions until I really started looking through old logs.

It turns out that Apache has a default setting in httpd.conf that specifies settings that can be overridden by content written to a .htaccess file: AllowOverride. Our httpd.conf might contain something like this:

<Directory />
  Options FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride All
  Order deny,allow
  Deny from all
</Directory>

Contrary to what we might think, Allparameter doesn't really mean "**[Allow overriding] all options** ", because it doesn't include MultiViewsthe options! The key here is the use of AllowOverride Options=All,MultiViews. Together with all the other directive groupings, this is the code we need:

<Directory />
  Options FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo Indexes Limit Options=All,MultiViews
  Order deny,allow
  Deny from all
</Directory>