Consolidating Error Pages with .htaccess
Before I get into the topic of how to consolidate all of your error pages, let me first explain how to use .htaccess to create custom error pages. If you already know how to do this feel free to skip to the next section.
Creating Custom Error Pages
.htaccess, among other things, allows you to specify custom error pages for your site. Say a user requests a file that does not exist, typically that person will get an error page that looks somewhat like this:
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Not Found
The requested URL /somepage.html was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
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Not only is this message not helpful, but it is unappealing. Most likely you worked tirelessly making your site look presentable, so it would be a shame for a user attempting to access a page on your site to be given an ugly error message.
.htaccess allows you to specify the page you would like to use as an error page for a particular error (404, 301, 500 etc.). To do this, if it does not already exist, create a file called .htaccess in the root ( / ) directory of your site, or whatever directory you want to use custom error pages for. Note that these custom error pages will be used not only for the directory that the .htaccess file is located in, but all of the ones below it, unless you specifically override it.
Once you have created your .htaccess file, for each error you would like a custom page for add the following line:
ErrorDocument
So for example, if you would like to use a custom error page for a 404 (file not found) do the following:
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
Where 404.html is your custom error page. Note that not every code is an error code. If you tried to set up an error page for code 200 you would end up creating an infinite loop.
Consolidating Your Error Pages
So you’ve setup your custom error pages. Mostly likely you haven’t taken the time to create a custom page for every error, and its most likely the case you don’t need to. I can honestly say I’ve never gone to a site and have it come up with a 414 Request URI Too Long error. Still, you might have taken the time to create several pages for the more common errors. You may even have a whole directory dedicated to error pages. Instead, you may want to consider using a single error page for all errors. If you’re experienced with .htaccess, you may already know how to accomplish this, if not I’ll show you.
In your .htaccess file you’ll still need to add a line for each error code you want to use a custom page for. Make sure to use the same scheme when naming all of your error pages, for example fourohfour.html, and 5hundred.php would be a bad choice. For this example I’ll use error.php (ie error404.php). These pages don’t actually need to (and should not) exist. Now we just need to create a RewriteRule for our error pages:
RewriteEngine On
ErrorDocument 404 /error404.php
ErrorDocument 500 /error500.php
RewriteRule ^error([0-9]+) error.php?code=$1 [NC]
You could eleminate the need for the rewrite rule by redirecting all of your errors to the same page like so:
RewriteEngine On
ErrorDocument 404 /error.php?code=404
ErrorDocument 500 /error.php?code=500
This, however, reveals the underlying system. This might not be a problem for most people, but some people prefer the look of urls that don’t contain parameters (?code=xxx). Also, if you decide you want to track what errors your users are getting (like what pages they are linking to that don’t exist) you can store this information in a database, in which case you wouldn’t want users to be aware of the underlying system.
Now whenever a user gets a 404 or a 500 error they will be redirected to error.php and the error code will be passed to that script. In error.php you can now set up custom messages for each error code. Here is a simple script as an example:
$code = $_GET['code']; //the error code
$code .= ''; //avoid integer indexing of the array
$errors = array( '300' => 'Multiple Choices',
'301' => 'Moved Permanently',
'302' => 'Moved Temporarily',
'303' => 'See Other',
'304' => 'Not Modified',
'305' => 'Use Proxy',
'400' => 'Bad Request',
'401' => 'Authorization Required',
'402' => 'Payment Required',
'403' => 'Forbidden',
'404' => 'Not Found',
'405' => 'Method Not Allowed',
'406' => 'Not Acceptable',
'407' => 'Proxy Authentication Required',
'408' => 'Request Timed Out',
'409' => 'Conflicting Request',
'410' => 'Gone',
'411' => 'Content Length Required',
'412' => 'Precondition Failed',
'413' => 'Request Entity Too Long',
'414' => 'Request URI Too Long',
'415' => 'Unsupported Media Type',
'500' => 'Internal Server Error',
'501' => 'Not Implemented',
'502' => 'Bad Gateway',
'503' => 'Service Unavailable',
'504' => 'Gateway Timeout',
'505' => 'HTTP Version Not Supported'
);
echo $code . ' ' . $errors[$code];
Clearly the error page generated by the script above would be no better than the default ones, but it is just an example. You could easily embed it into your site in order to maintain consistency for your users.
