.htaccess “Options not allowed here”

Question

I have this in my .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks

And I get the following error in the apache error_log:

.htaccess: Options not allowed he         


        

Answer 1

Change Options +FollowSymLinks into Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch in all instances of .htaccess file, the followsymlinks has been disabled on many server due to security risk.

Answer 2

Note that this is a XAMPP-specific issue. XAMPP loads some additional configuration files located in XAMPP/etc/extra/ that override httpd.conf. For me the offending file is http-userdir.conf which applies rules for ~user requests and contains the line AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes and changing that line to AllowOverride All did indeed solve my issue.

This only applies to files served from your /Sites/ directory on OS X. I don't know if the Windows version uses UserDir at all or even has a similar rule.

Answer 3

On Debian 9 i edited the file /etc/apache2/mods-available/userdir.conf

Disabled this line AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes

Added this line Allowoverride All

And it worked fine.

Many thanks to all who contributed