Custom Error Messages

The htaccess gives you the ability to redirect the visitor to different pages if they try to access an invalid page. You can use a custom error page for any type of error as long as you know its number. Example: 404 Page Not Found. The layout for this command is:

ErrorDocument errornumber /filename.html

So if you create a page called "NotFound.html" and you wanted to use it as the 404 error page, the command would be:

ErrorDocument 404 /NotFound.html

If you want to keep all of the error pages in a separate directory, just include the directory name in the file path:

ErrorDocument 404 /errorpages/NotFound.html

The most used error documents are:

• 400 - Bad Request: A generic kind of error that people get into by doing some strange stuff with your URL or scripts.
• 401 - Authorization Required: When someone tries to enter a protected area without proper authorization.
• 403 - Forbidden: When a file with permissions not allowing it to be accessed by the user is requested. 404 Not Found Kinda obvious.
• 500- Internal Server Error: This may help you with internal server errors in any scripts you have running.

There are many others, but these are probably all you will ever need to know.