.htaccess custom errors

[damiancds]

Lately I've been adding my own custom error pages and i decided to finish them out and add the 500,400,401,403, and 404 errorsI've got the 404, and 401 done,Working on the 403, i can't seem to get it to show up.my understanding of the 403 is that if someone goes to a directory, and it doesn't have any sort of index page, it would show the 403 error instead of a directory listing(i'd like to not show all my images and other resources as a directory, but serve up this 403 error instead.)In my .htaccess i have

ErrorDocument 404 /system/error/not_found.php ErrorDocument 500 /system/error/internal_server_error.php ErrorDocument 400 /system/error/bad_request.php ErrorDocument 401 /system/error/auth_required.php ErrorDocument 403 /system/error/forbidden.php

every page has been created, it's just that the forbidden.php page won't come up. Chances are I have the purpose of the 403 error mixed up so any clarification would be helpfulthanks,

[jeffman]

First you need to disable indexing. Add this to your .htaccess:options -indexes

[damiancds]

okay, sweet, it worked,but does that line have any side effects, I mean what exactly does "options -indexes" dodoes it just affect directories without indexes?thanks,

[jeffman]

Index files will perform as usual. This only disables the automatic indexing that would occur when an index file is not present.

[damiancds]

Okay, thanks for the reply,Feel better knowing exactly what it does,thanks,

[holmedwa04]

Thats interesting that is! I used to have the same problem and thought it was something to do with the way my host had set up the server. I just ended up making an index file in each location that I wanted to hide the contents and then using a php include to server up the error message but it was a bit of a pain. I have moved hosts now and it just seems to work correctly. So I have gone back to the proper .htaccess way with it. But that is very useful for future reference. Thanks