Index.php location

What happens if there is a index.php and a index.html file in the root directory at the same time?

That depends on your server’s configuration; the directive is DirectoryIndex and it takes a list of files and will apply them in order.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_dir.html
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/directoryindex.html (for IIS)

Jason swears that that particular scenario leads to a black hole opening up and swallowing all the Intrawebs. Or maybe not.

Maybe the black hole just swallows up Al Gore?

Default Apache config will look for the index.html before the index.php, but as Susan said, it depends on your server config. Your host may not use the default configuration for that.

That’s interesting. Learn something new every day! I had always been under the impression that it was the browser that determined the search order and thus, for example:

http://www.somewhere.com/ was slower than
http://www.somewhere.com/index.php

because there was a back-and-forth between the browser (trying various index.somethings, welcome.somethings, etc.) and the web server.

Of course, the downside to having bookmarks that explicitly say "index.php" (or whatever) is that if the site changes, you get a "Page not found" message.

One of the things I had tried in the past, was to have an index.html file stored in a sub-directory. I then temporarily moved (or copied) it to the web root directory when I was doing maintenance on the site. I changed that to swap the two files instead, because of people still getting into the site (they had index.php specified explicitly).

I suppose the obvious answer is for me to create a "down for maintenance" version of index.php and swap the two index.php files

Quote from: daleylife at Jan 17, 2011, 02:36 PM

I suppose you would confuse the server if you had more than 1 index.php or index.html? ha ha!!

Only if they are in the same directory

It would probably use the youngest... Maybe the younger version of index.php should be called index.php-jr ?

I don’t think you can have more than one version of the index.php file... the Apache configuration explicitly lists the files that should fulfill the indexing function in its DirectoryIndex directive. This is how some sites use a "default.html" instead of the more common "index.html"

For example:



In that example, if you had an index.php and an index2.html both in the same directory, and you navigated to that directory, e.g. www.yoursite.com/yourdir/, then Apache would serve up the index.php page because it’s defined first in the DirectoryIndex directive. If you deleted the index.php, then the page request would cause Apache to serve up the index2.html. If you put in an index.html in that directory, then the same request would bring up index.html because it has priority.

www.yoursite.com/index.html is technically a bit faster because you are explicitly asking for a certain file, whereas www.yoursite.com/ is relying on Apache to calculate which file should be returned. In that same vein, www.yoursite.com/somedir is slightly slower than www.yoursite.com/somedir/ because the trailing slash explicitly says that you’re requesting a directory, whereas if you omit that trailing slash, Apache has to figure out whether you are requesting a file or a directory, then once it figures out that you’re requesting a directory, it has to scan the directory for a valid DirectoryIndex.

Make sense?

Is DirectoryIndex one of those directives one can put in .htaccess ?

Possibly; it depends on the server configuration whether or not it allows that.

http://www.htaccess-guide.com/directoryindex-uses/