From the Orient

I’ve been playing with Vellum a bit today. One of the features of Vellum is funky caching where if you change a blog entry, you simply delete the page. When requested, you redirect the 404 error to the build process of Vellum. Great, but I had one problem with it. Usually, I let Apache sort out directory requests so /orient/ goes to /orient/index.shtml.

However, if vellum has deleted index.html because it has been rebuilt and index.html hasn’t been expressly requested, Apache errors with “Directory index forbidden by rule:”

So, I tried “Redirect / index.html” in .htaccess, but Apache didn’t want know: “.htaccess: Redirect to non-URL”. index.html doesn’t exist, I’m not going to redirect.

Thankfully, mod_rewrite to the rescue (again).

Options FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ /104test/index.html
ErrorDocument 404 /vellum104/vellum.cgi?a=build

Paul Apache, Blogging, Vellum