htaccess question
 

I usually pay people to design our sites and then pay someone else to manage them. but this time i am doing my own little personal project site by myself and there are a few things that i am not sure how to do. mainly i want to know how to protect some of the directories without blocking access to their contents. for example, lets say that i use the directory "/pics/" as the image directory and i want people to be able to view the pictures in it (linked from pages on the site) but i don't want people to be able to view a list of the contents of the folder by typing in "domian.com/pics/". how do i stop it from listing the directory's contents? I am pretty sure you can do it by adding a separate htaccess to that directory but i don't know what to put in that htaccess that keeps it from displaying the list of what it contains while still showing the pics. does that make sense?

final example:

typing in "domain.com/pics/image1.jpg" shows the picture image1.jpg

but

typing in "domain.com/pics/" = access denied or something similar



how do i do this?

Options -Index

Try adding that to your htaccess file, this should do the trick.

tried that and everything came up as a 500 internal server error. are you fucking with me or is that supposed to work?

yeah, that seems to have worked, now it shows the directory but it hides the contents of it. is there a way that i can just forward it to another url (instead of showing the directory page) or control what happens instead of just showing an empty directory?

should be
Options -Indexes

Ok, if you turn of indexes, it generates an error when they hit it, so set custom error documents also

ErrorDocument 404 /index.html
ErrorDocument 403 /index.html
ErrorDocument 401 /index.html

or some other local file on the server.

good looking out tom, that worked. thanks

With a Control Panel like Cpanel, you wouldn't have to break your head ... one click, and it is done.

Also, if this is your server, and you have full access to it, you should really not use .htaccess at all, and disable it completely. Webmasters seem to love this file, but it really hurts performance. Anything you can put into an htaccess file you can put into your httpd.conf file instead. .htaccess really should only be used in shared hosting enviroments where you normally wouldnt have access to the httpd.conf.

<Directory /path/to/your/images>
Options -Indexes
</Directory>