Simple htaccess directives that may assist you.

[runthis]

This example is to not allow access to directories that have no index defined. A sloppy way of doing this is to manually create index.html files in these directories. This one line in your htaccess may help more.

 

Options +FollowSymlinks

 

Now this produces a nasty looking 403 Forbidden page, so lets define some error page redirects, this is a great way to style these error pages, but an even better way to stop specific users from trying to access your data with a simple redirect that states every error as a 404 type page

 

ErrorDocument 400 /404.php
ErrorDocument 401 /404.php
ErrorDocument 403 /404.php
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
ErrorDocument 414 /404.php
ErrorDocument 500 /404.php

 

This above code redirects these error messages to 404.php which could contain code like this which tells a 403 forbidden error to say "Does not exist" which would make a user assume the directory is invalid/

 

 $http_status=$_SERVER["REDIRECT_STATUS"];
 if($http_status == 403) { $error="Does not exist."; }
 echo $error;

 

Also in a game type situation you could have someone trying to discover tricks or cheats in your game, so this file would be a great place to log some sessions into a database table called error_pages and maybe only log the important ones such as 403 and 500 (for debugging).

 

 

Moving on, lets say you have a login.php page and you simply want to hide the php extension, so users could visit domain.com/login or want that to display in the browser. This htaccess directive would assist with this.

 

## only need RewriteEngine on if it is not set already
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php

 

 

If your server supports gzip compression (mod_deflate) then this is great way to send compressed documents to the end users web browser, which is almost a trade off because the browser has to decompress it, but helps with the server. If you have a cPanel this could also be accomplished easily through Optimize Website. If mod_deflate is compiled on your server , this option would automatically show in cPanel depending on your hosts configuration. There are many different ways to write these, this is your basic example.

 

# compress text,html,js,css,xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

 

 

This next example shows how you can satisfy gtmetrix and yslow while getting some premium caching done on the end users browser. This assumes mod_expires is complied on your server.

 

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
 <filesmatch "\.(jpg|gif|png|css|js)$">
      ExpiresActive on
      ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
  </filesmatch>
</ifmodule>

 

This tells the browser to keep common images like jpg,gif,png and files like css,js for 1 month. This should in no way be enabled on a dev site as you might be asking your users to clear cache a lot.

 

Thats all for now. Feel free to improve upon these in your replies to help future readers or even googlers.

[KyleMassacre]

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
 <filesmatch "\.(jpg|gif|png|css|js)$">
      ExpiresActive on
      ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
  </filesmatch>
</ifmodule>

 

For this example you are using I did some googleing and came across this:

# 1 YEAR
<filesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400, public"
</filesMatch>
# 1 WEEK
<filesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</filesMatch>
# 2 DAYS
<filesMatch "\.(xml|txt|css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=172800, proxy-revalidate"
</filesMatch>
# 1 MIN
<filesMatch "\.(html|htm|php)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=60, private, proxy-revalidate"
</filesMatch>

[runthis]

Very nice addition

[Ishraq]

You made my day mate. You came and made many threads which are really useful. Keep it up mate :)