htaccess errordocument not working

Question

My understanding is that to show a custom error page, one must put

ErrorDocument 404 /error/404.php

in .htaccess

Also,

AllowOverride All

must be set in httpd.conf file. However, right now it's set to

AllowOverride None

If I change None to All, then restart the server, I get a Internal Server Error 500 when I deliberately enter gibberish in the address bar. What am I doing wrong?

Other things in the file

IndexIgnore *

followed by

RewriteEngine on

followed by rewrite rules.

RewriteEngine on is the cause of the problem--see below.

Answer 1

Short answer: This error means you forgot to enable the rewrite module and is not related to ErrorDocument.

How to fix it?

Make sure you have enabled the rewrite module. This can be done by doing one of the following:

1. Uncommenting LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so in your Apache configuration file.
2. Run a2enmod rewrite as root (only available on Debian-based systems).

Why are you only getting this error after you added ErrorDocument?

AllowOverride was set to None, which means your .htaccess will be completely ignored. Later, you set it to All to enable .htaccess files.

However, you forgot to enable the rewrite module but you tried to use it in your .htaccess. This is not related to ErrorDocument and is simply a coincidence. The following error you posted is clearly showing it:

[Sat Aug 17 17:33:46 2013] [alert] [client 127.0.0.1] C:/Data/MyWeb/.htaccess: Invalid command 'RewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration