When starting a new web project one of the first things I do is download the most up to date HTML5 Boilerplate. It provides a great starting point for the HTML you need in a project. It also comes with an extremely complete .htaccess file. While this is very nice for a single site they recommend you do something different for multiple sites at the very top.

(!) Using .htaccess files slows down Apache, therefore, if you have access to the main server config file (usually called httpd.conf), you should add this logic there: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/htaccess.html.

This got me to their awesome collection of server configs which has their, and in many ways the communities, recommended settings depending on your webserver. The apache configs have the same .htaccess file so I decided to dig into how to do this.

They direct you to the apache article about using .htaccess files which has a similar comment about their use.

You should avoid using .htaccess files completely if you have access to httpd main server config file Using .htaccess files slows down your Apache http server. Any directive that you can include in a .htaccess file is better set in a Directory block, as it will have the same effect with better performance.

So I decided to set this up on my Linode VPS which is running Ubuntu 10.04. As stated in the original file comment they recommend using the httpd.conf file for your custom configuration like this. But apparently that file could be overwritten on updates of Apache which would be pretty annoying. Luckily the default Apache config file (apache2.conf on 10.04) includes the contents of the conf.d folder which is in the same location. By creating a foo.conf file in that directory Apache should immediately load its contents. As mentioned in the comment from the Apache site the custom configuration needs to be wrapped in a Directory block. The block expects you to provide a path to the files you want to be affected by the contained configuration. Since I wanted this to work for all the sites being served by Apache I simply used /srv/www/*/ which includes my entire sites directory.

Besides the speed increased gained by using a global .htaccess file this allows you to have much shorter custom files for site specific configuration. For example only required configuration for one of my sites was the ErrorDocuments. Now my .htaccess file went from 300+ lines to

ErrorDocument 403 /403.php
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
ErrorDocument 500 /500.php