About the Author

Chris Shiflett is an author and speaker who leads the web application security practice at OmniTI.

Handling 404 Errors with PHP

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 at 07:01:08 GMT
4 Comments
References

The PHP site does some nice trickery with 404 errors (plus 401 and 403). This is what accomodates short URLs like http://www.php.net/security. Want to do something similar on your own site? I see people asking how to do this all the time, even though the entire site is open source. Just have a look at the error.php script and write something similar for your own site. Use Apache's ErrorDocument directive to have your own error.php script handle any error code you want:

ErrorDocument 401 /error.php
ErrorDocument 403 /error.php
ErrorDocument 404 /error.php

If you have a more flexible error script that people can implement with less hacking, feel free to let me know (or just leave a comment).

About This Post

Handling 404 Errors with PHP was posted on Sat, 30 Oct 2004 at 07:01:08 GMT.

4 Comments

1. Ryan said:

If looking for something to do with a 404 page, take a look at this article[http://www.alistapart.com/articles/perfect404/].
Sat, 30 Oct 2004 at 15:45:08 GMT Link

2. Chris said:

There is a problem with this method...

Each page hit still registers as a 404 in apache error logs.

Looking at stats reports (eg webalizer, awstats), you see a lot of 'missing' pages. Depending on how much you interpret & use stats packages, this could cause a problem.
Mon, 01 Nov 2004 at 02:15:08 GMT Link

3. David said:

I wrote an article about this for ONLamp.com a little while ago. It's available here:

--> http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/02/13/davidsklar.html
Mon, 01 Nov 2004 at 18:55:24 GMT Link

4. Chris Shiflett said:

Well done, Dave. That's way better. :-)
Mon, 01 Nov 2004 at 19:37:05 GMT Link

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