Apache DirectorySlash seems not to be working

Question

I am facing problems with a site that I am trying to deploy. The site is working fine on my development host, but fails on deployment. Both hosts have a very similar configuration, both are Ubuntu Linux distros (dev: 11.10, deploy: 10.04), both use apache2, etc.

Both sites have mod_dir enabled, but the deployment one seems not to add the trailing slash to directory names, while the development one does. So, when I enter this URL (removed http to avoid silly stackoverflow antispam filtering):

devel.mydomain.com/admin

The development host redirects it to:

devel.mydomain.com/admin/

In deployment http://mydomain.com/admin is not redirected to mydomain.com/admin/ for unknown reasons, and I end with a 404 error. Of course if I enter mydomain.com/admin/, adding the trailing slash by hand, it works as expected. But I rather like to redirect also mydomain.com/admin to mydomain.com/admin/

The question is WHY in devel mod_dir seems to be doing the redirection and in deployment it does not.

I have done a grep within configuration files to see if the DirectorySlash directive was being disabled somewhere and found nothing. It is neither enabled explicitly on devel, so I think it should be on by default. Anyway I add this to my .htaccess file on deployment host:

DirectorySlash on

But it did not work neither.

Any hints?

Answer 1

The /admin folder is password protected. I did not think that this was relevant, but in fact it is.

Also I have these rules on my .htaccess file:

    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
    RewriteRule .* index.php [L]
    </IfModule>

The problem is related to this - see here for a good explanation.

Basically, when Apache generates a 401 error to ask the browser for a password, it also generates another request that does not use any folder, directory, or symlink, so it is redirected to index.php.

The workaround is to add this to the .htaccess file on site root folder:

ErrorDocument 401 /error/null.html
ErrorDocument 403 /error/null.html

and create that file, for example like this:

touch ./error/null.html

These are not best practices but they'll do for now while I look for a better solution.