NANOWEB, the aEGiS PHP web server

keeping apaches .htaccess files Features

NANOWEB uses a different configuration file layout (ini style) than apache (markup style) does; also most of the directives names differ.
This is no problem if you start with nanoweb or if you're going to switch to nanoweb fully. However, when you need or want to switch between these two webservers you need to take care, because apache throws an HTTP error 500 on any directive found in one of the per-directory configuration files if it doesn't know it. Nanoweb in contrast just ignores any directive it doesn't know; so from it's point there is no problem at all.

However, as nanoweb per default looks for configuration directives in .nwaccess and apache reads .htaccess instead there's no problem for the two different servers if you just place two versions in every directory.

As there exists a few configuration directives in nanoweb that were designed for compatibility with existing .htaccess files from apache (mod_rewrite for example), you may wish nanoweb to read .htaccess files (AccessFile directive) and don't want to keep two concurrent versions up to date.
The solution to this problem is to prevent apache from reading configuration directives it doesn't understand:

# following directives are understood by apache and nanoweb:

DirectoryIndex  index.php index.pdf index.html
LanguagePriority ep en de fr es

RewriteRule ^file(.+)$ newpath/newfile$1  [NC]


# this is apache-specific and thus ignored by nanoweb

AddHandler cgi-script .bat


# apache will ignore everything in between following "tags",
# while nanoweb still notices it
<IfModule nanoweb>

  # nanoweb version of AddHandler
  ParseExt = .bat CGI C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM $FILENAME

  # multi-purpose http communication enhancement
  AddHeader = X-Powered-by: beer

  # and all others...
  AllowExtSymLinks = 1
  FbSortOrder = name

</IfModule>

(sample .htaccess file)

NANOWEB, the aEGiS PHP web server

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