Problem redirecting 403 Forbidden to 404 Not Found

Question

The pertinent part of my .htaccess looks like this:

Options -Indexes

    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all

Re         


        

Answer 1

With rewrite mod:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [R=404]

Every file or dir who begin with a dot will be redirected to 404.

/myDir/.svn => 404
/.gitignore => 404
/dir1/dir2_dir3/

Or to change all 403,400 errors into 404 errors, put this at the end of /etc/apache2/conf.d/localized-error-pages OR into a .htaccess

# Will raise a 404 error, because the file  doesn't exist.
# We change 403 or 400 to 404 !
ErrorDocument 400 /fake_file_for_apache_404.php
ErrorDocument 403 /fake_file_for_apache_404.php
# We need to rewrite 404 error, else we will have "fake_file_for_apache_404.php not found"
ErrorDocument 404 "
Not Found
The requested URL  was not found on this server.
"
ErrorDocument 500 "Server in update. Please comme back later."