How to use errordocument to redirect to a php file in the same folder?

Question

I want to take requests for missing files in a specific folder and redirect them to program.php in that folder.

This is a program I will use a lot in different places, and I would prefer to avoid specifying the name of the folder in the htaccess file.

I have tried just putting:

errordocument 404 program.php

but the result is that the browser just prints out "program.php" and doesn't execute program.php.

I understand why this is happening: based on the documentation at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html, url's that don't begin with a slash or http are interpreted as a text message.

The question is how to get around this limitation to be able to access the same folder.

Answer 1

I ended up using rewriterule instead of errordocument:

rewriteengine on
rewritecond %{request_filename} !-f
rewriterule ^(.+).jpg$ program.php?i=$1.jpg [L]

The second line verifies that the file does not exist, so that existing images will be shown correctly.

Answer 2

Why not have one ErrorDocument handle all the errors in all the folders? Might be much cleaner that way. You could then handle the individual case using $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] which should contain the original request if I remember correctly.

Answer 3

How about this. In your root path, you set up a generic error.php file. However, all it does is parse the REQUEST_URI, check the path, see whether there is a custom error.php there, and include that. Could work, huh?

Answer 4

Have you tried a (relative or absolute) path? If you make it relative, it should be to the web root, which might server your purpose.

ErrorDocument 404 /program.php

Answer 5

You want:

ErrorDocument 404 /program.php

According to the docs, "URLs can begin with a slash (/) for local web-paths (relative to the DocumentRoot)."

Answer 6

If you have only a small number of folders, you can probably use:

<Directory /path/a>
   ErrorDocument 404 /a/program.php
</Directory>
<Directory /path/b>
   ErrorDocument 404 /b/program.php
</Directory> 
<Directory /path/c>
   ErrorDocument 404 /c/program.php
</Directory>

If that is impractical, then you should only have one program.php in the root and have it respond differently depending on the contents of the REDIRECT_URL environment variable, which is $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'] in php.