I am writing this because I couldn’t find any information on how to enable PHP for a single directory.
Let’s say we have a website example.com, whose documentRoot is in /var/www/vhosts/example.com. I want PHP disabled for the entire website apart from the directory /myApp.
Let’s say the configuration of the vhost is something like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin me@example.com
ServerName example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/example.com
<Directory /var/www/vhost/example.com>
Options -Indexes
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
#disable PHP:
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com-error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com-access.log combined
As you can see we have turned off PHP globally for the whole website.
One thing I found by trail and error is that if you change engine Off to engine On in the above example, PHP will still not work.
That is the case in the current Ubuntu (Debian) Apache 2 with mod_php 5. I dont know if this is a feature or a bug.
If you want to switch on the PHP engine, try 1 instead of On.
This works:
php_admin_value engine 1
So now we need to figure out how to override the flag just for the /myApp directory.
Overriding with <Directory> does not work. What I found is that overriding with <Location> does work. That’s probably because <Location> is called last (after <Directory> and .htaccess).
So here is how to override the PHP engine flag directive for one single directory:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin me@example.com
ServerName example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/example.com
<Directory /var/www/vhost/example.com>
Options -Indexes
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
#disable PHP:
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
<Location /myApp>
php_admin_value engine 1
</Location>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com-error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com-access.log combined
I haven’t tried it with .htaccess because I don’t use it any more.