Learn How to Build Websites
You can password protect specific directories on your website very easily in just a few minutes. You might want to password protect a directory to:
A common error message that you might see when creating your website is a 500 Internal Server error. The error is particularly frustrating because it gives you no information about what specifically caused the server error. The steps in this article should help you to diagnose and find what is causing your 500 Internal Server error.
The internal server error message can be customized by each website that you visit, which means that the error might appear in various different forms when you experience it. A few of the common examples of how this error appears are:
"500 Internal Server Error" "HTTP 500 - Internal Server Error" "Internal Server Error" "HTTP 500 Internal Error" "500 Error" "HTTP Error 500"
If you're using Internet Explorer and get the dreaded The website cannot display the page message, this might be a 500 Internal Server Error as well. You can check this by looking for the 500 in your IE toolbar.
A server error can be caused by any number of things from uploading the incorrect file to as bug in a piece of code. The web server is telling you that something went wrong, but it's not sure exactly what that is.
It's a server-side error which means it might be something to do with the websites programming or configuration settings.
If the server is using Microsoft IIS software rather than Apache, there may be additional clues in the error to help you pinpoint the issue. For example, a 500.19 means the server configuration data is invalid. You can see the list of Microsoft server specific error codes here.
The problem here is with the server, not your computer or browser, but it may be that there are a few issues with your connection to the server that are causing the problem. Here are few solutions that might help to fix the error:
httpd.conf.httpd.conf by changing TimeOut
TimeOut 600
If you're running a script, like PHP for example, you can increase the time out of this as well. For PHP this would mean changing the max_execution_time from the default of 30 (seconds) to something longer:
max_execution_time 60
If you've tried to troubleshoot your 500 server error and still can't fix it, then you may need to speak to your web host and see if they are able to find what process or script is causing the error.
If you are using a commercial web hosting company their customer support should be able to provide information on how to fix the error and in many cases they will apply the fix for you at no cost.
A common question asked in webmaster forums is how to block certain web spiders, crawlers or bots from accessing your site. You can do this using robots.txt, but some web crawlers have been known to ignore this request. A more reliable way to block bots is to use your .htaccess file instead.
Web crawlers are often known as spiders or bots that systematically browse the web and perform automated tasks on your site. They can perform tasks such as:
Some bots are more sinister and will search your website for email addresses or forms that will be used to spam you or even search for security risks within your code.
Before you can start blocking web crawlers using .htaccess you'll need a couple of things first:
Note: unless you block all bots trying to access your website, you'll never fully be able to block them. New bots are made and existing ones modified all the time to get around anything you put in your .htaccess file. The best you can hope for is to make it more difficult for the bad bots who want to spam you or hack you.
To block a bot from trying to crawl your site you need to find one of two pieces of information about the bot — either the IP address the bot is using to access the web or the “User Agent String” which is the name of the crawler (for example Googlebot).
This database of 302 web bots might be useful if you already know the name of the bot you want to block with .htaccess.
Alternatively, you'll need to download your log files using FTP and open them with a text editor. The default location for your log files can vary depending on your server setup. If you aren't able to find your logs yourself, as your hosting company where they are stored.
To narrow down your search it helps if you can pinpoint which page the bot visited or what time they crawled the page so that you can search through your log.
Once you've found the bot(s) that you'd like to try and block, you can add them to your .htaccess file. Blocking the IP or bot name won't necessarily stop the bot forever, as they can be changed or moved to a new IP address.
To start, you'll need to download your .htaccess file via FTP and take a copy of it in case you need to restore it later. The snippets below will show you how to block bots using either the IP address or the User-Agent string.
Order Deny,Allow Deny from 127.0.0.1
You would obviously need to change 127.0.0.1 to whichever IP you'd like to block. Order Deny,Allow simply means that if the web server has a request that matches the Deny rule then it will deny it. If it doesn't match the Deny rule then it will allow it.
The second line is telling the server to deny any requests from 127.0.0.1 which will issue a Forbidden message instead of the actual web page being requested.
You can add more IP's by adding Deny from lines to your .htaccess:
Order Deny,Allow Deny from 127.0.0.1 Deny from 215.146.3.3 Deny from 190.86.1.1
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} AdsBot-Google [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} msnbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} AltaVista [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Slurp
RewriteRule . - [F,L]
What this does is takes a list of conditions (RewriteCond) and applies a rule to them. The F stands for Forbidden and the L means it's the last rule in the set.
Once you've made the changes and blocked the bots or IP's you want to, you can save the .htaccess file and upload it to your server, overwriting the original one.
You can keep the file updated as new bots or IP need to be blocked and if you did make a mistake you can revert it by using the original .htaccess file or just deleting the rules.
One of the first things you might notice when you install Drupal is that trying to visit a file or folder that is not controlled by the Drupal CMS returns a 404 File Not Found error. This happens even if those files and folders do exist. So for example if you went to mysite.com/not-drupal/ it would display the error – even if that folder exists.
When Drupal is installed, it creates a .htaccess file on your server which allows it to take control of all the files and folders within the CMS. What Drupal does is:
# Set the default handler. DirectoryIndex index.php
What this means is that the web server will only look for index.php inside the folder mysite.com/not-drupal/. Any other file types will be ignored and will return a 404 Error.
# Make Drupal handle any 404 errors. ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
index.php again for Drupal to control – rather than the default which is for the web browser to issue the password prompt. If the 401 error handler does not point to a valid file, it will return a 404 which is controlled by Drupal.
Fixing this in the htaccess is fairly easy and should take only a couple of minutes to complete. Using FTP, you'll need to download the .htaccess file from your main directory. This is usually public_html or www. Once you've got the file (and have backed it up) here's what you need to do:
mysite.com/non-drupal/). Find the line in your htaccess which says:
# Set the default handler. DirectoryIndex index.php
And change it to:
# Set the default handler. DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.shtml
You might also need to add other file names here depending on your needs. What this does is tell your web server to look for any of those file when loading a folder, which is the more standard behavior.
# Set the 401 Error page. ErrorDocument 401 /401.html
This will tell the Apache server to redirect all Unauthorized errors to this page rather than as a 404 through Drupal. You'll also need to create a 401.html document and upload that to your server. This will display when people do not have the correct password or try to access password restricted resources.
The last step is to clear your browser cache so that you can see the changes that have been made. To do this you can force a refresh of your browser which makes Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer etc re-check the server to make sure it has the latest version of the page. To do this, you can use a keyboard shortcut:
If this doesn't work then you can clear your cache by using the settings in your browser.