Installation guide

Chapter 14. Apache HTTP Server 195
14.5.27. Allow
Allow specifies which requester can access a given directory. The requester can be all, a domain
name, an IP address, a partial IP address, a network/netmask pair, and so on. Your DocumentRoot
directory is configured to Allow requests from all meaning everyone has access.
14.5.28. Deny
Deny works just like Allow, but you are specifying who is denied access. Your DocumentRoot is not
configured to Deny requests from anyone by default.
14.5.29. UserDir
UserDir is the name of the subdirectory within each user’s home directory where they should place
personal HTML files which are to be served by the Web server.
By default, the subdirectory is public_html. For example, the server might receive the following
request:
http://your_domain/~username/foo.html
The server would look for the file:
/home/username/public_html/foo.html
In the above example, /home/username/ is the user’s home directory (note that the default path to
users’ home directories may be different on your system).
Make sure that the permissions on the users’ home directories are set correctly. Users’ home direc-
tories must be set to 0711. The read (r) and execute (x) bits must be set on the users’ public_html
directories (0755 will also work). Files that will be served in users’ public_html directories must
be set to at least 0644.
This directive is set to disable by default.
14.5.30. DirectoryIndex
The DirectoryIndex is the default page served by the server when a user requests an index of a
directory by specifying a forward slash (/) at the end of the directory name.
When a user requests the page http://your_domain/this_directory /, they will get either the
DirectoryIndex page if it exists, or a server-generated directory list. The default for Directo-
ryIndex is index.html index.htm index.shtml index.php index.php4 index.php3 in-
dex.cgi. The server will try to find any one of these files, and will return the first one it finds. If
it does not find any of these files and Options Indexes is set for that directory, the server will
generate and return a listing, in HTML format, of the subdirectories and files in the directory.
14.5.31. AccessFileName
AccessFileName names the file which the server should use for access control information in each
directory. By default, your Web server is set to use .htaccess, if it exists, for access control infor-
mation in each directory.
Immediately after the AccessFileName directive, a set of Files tags apply access control to any
file beginning with a .ht. These directives deny Web access to any .htaccess files (or other files
which begin with .ht) for security reasons.