Andrew M. Whalen

I use my PowerMac G5 at work to develop and design sites locally. Apache in Mac OS X seems to come with MultiViews enabled by default. Multiviews is part of mod_negotiation. I know mod_negotiation as it is very helpful with setting mime types using code like:

AddType image/gif .gif

MultiViews I was unfamiliar with. What it does is take a url like:

http://coolsite.com/llama

and it does a search in the root directory for a file or directory which could match llama.*, such as llama.jpg, then delivers that content to the user.

This seems like it would be very helpful in certain situations, but I wasn’t liking this feature, since it was interfering with my .htaccess rewrites. It took me awhile to figure it out, but by turning this off, I was able to gain control of rewrites again.

Here’s how I did it. I opened the httpd.conf file:

sudo pico /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf

And switched the line that said:

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

to

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

It was that simple. After that, I could rewrite everything I wanted.