Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5 - DEPLOYMENT Deployment Manual page 361

General Configuration Tips
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DefaultIcon
DefaultIcon specifies the icon displayed in server generated directory listings for files which have
no other icon specified. The unknown.gif image file is the default.
DefaultType
DefaultType sets a default content type for the Web server to use for documents whose MIME
types cannot be determined. The default is text/plain.
Deny
Deny works similar to Allow, except it specifies who is denied access. The DocumentRoot is not
configured to Deny requests from anyone by default.
Directory
<Directory /path/to/directory> and </Directory> tags create a container used to enclose
a group of configuration directives which apply only to a specific directory and its subdirectories. Any
directive which is applicable to a directory may be used within Directory tags.
By default, very restrictive parameters are applied to the root directory (/), using the Options (refer
to Options) and AllowOverride (refer to AllowOverride) directives. Under this configuration, any
directory on the system which needs more permissive settings has to be explicitly given those settings.
In the default configuration, another Directory container is configured for the DocumentRoot which
assigns less rigid parameters to the directory tree so that the Apache HTTP Server can access the
files residing there.
The Directory container can be also be used to configure additional cgi-bin directories for server-
ScriptAlias
side applications outside of the directory specified in the ScriptAlias directive (refer to
for more information).
To accomplish this, the Directory container must set the ExecCGI option for that directory.
For example, if CGI scripts are located in /home/my_cgi_directory, add the following Directory
container to the httpd.conf file:
<Directory /home/my_cgi_directory> Options +ExecCGI </Directory>
Next, the AddHandler directive must be uncommented to identify files with the .cgi extension as
AddHandler
CGI scripts. Refer to for instructions on setting AddHandler.
For this to work, permissions for CGI scripts, and the entire path to the scripts, must be set to 0755.
DirectoryIndex
The DirectoryIndex is the default page served by the server when a user requests an index of a
directory by specifying a forward slash (/) at the end of the directory name.
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