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Change default directory page

Web Hosting Articles » A simple guide to .htaccess » Change default directory page


Most probably you have been wondering how the Webserver decides which page from your site to use as a main/default page of your site.  There is a directive named DirectoryIndex which takes care of this.

On most web servers there is a pre-defined set of file names which server a start page.
The most commonly used are: index.html, default.html, index.php, index.asp, etc.

The good news is that you can set your custom file to be a start page of your site using .htaccess.

For example the following line set home-page.html as a main page of your site:

DirectoryIndex home-page.html

The DirectoryIndex directive can accept more than one name:

DirectoryIndex home-page.html Home.html, index.html index.php index.cgi

So when a visitors goes to http://www.example.com the first page to be loaded will be the home-page.html if it cannot be found the server will look then for Home.html, index.html, etc until it finds a match.


  1. How to block users from accessing your site based on their IP address
  2. How to prevent or allow directory listing?
  3. How to change the error documents – 404 Page Not Found, etc
  4. Using .htaccess for password protecting your folders
  5. Using .htaccess to block referrer spam
  6. Disable Hot-Linking of images and other files
  7. Redirect URLs using .htaccess
  8. Introduction to mod_rewrite and some basic examples
  9. Force SSL/https using .htaccess and mod_rewrite
  10. 301 Permanent redirects for parked domain names
  11. Enable CGI, SSI with .htaccess
  12. How to add Mime-Types using .htaccess
  13. Change default directory page
  14. Block Bad robots, spiders, crawlers and harvesters
  15. Make PHP to work in your HTML files with .htacess
  16. Change PHP variables using .htaccess
  17. HTTP Authentication with PHP running as CGI/SuExec
  18. Force www vs non-www to avoid duplicate content on Google
  19. Duplicate content fix index.html vs / (slash only)

Comments 5 >>

Luis Said,
Nov 27, 2006 @ 08:01

You have all starts :). Thanks for this great tutorial.

Regards
zainuddin Said,
Feb 05, 2008 @ 03:38

I want to update the deafault page or Home page of the site .the site is still not geting update with index.html
How to set the default page please explain
Liviu Said,
Feb 28, 2009 @ 06:57

I have an 'index.php' file which is included in a 'default.php' file. The 'default.php' file is what I want the page to be, but it opens by default the 'index.php' file. It's strange, because I had a '.htaccess' file in my root and the DirectoryIndex was set to 'default.php'. Any ideas on how to fix this problem? Thanks in advance
Peter Said,
May 21, 2009 @ 21:39

I have a site with incoming links to pages which do not exist any longer. I don't know what all of these pages are as I bought the domain.

How do I use the htaccess so that any request for a page that no longer exists will redirect to the index so that my links are counted.

Thanks
Vince Said,
May 25, 2009 @ 15:33

@Peter

You can try:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !jpg|jpeg|gif|css|js|png [NC]
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
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