Create custom error pages with .htaccess - Tutorials, Articles, SEO, CMS, MySQL

Hi,

In this article I am going to show you how to use .htaccess to create a custom error page instead of having the 110mb default. As a bonus Im also going to show you how to use PHP to make a universal error page for all the errors that are possible.

Ok, so first we need to create and configure a .htaccess file. This is very simple, just open up your favorite text editor (Windows : Notepad) and paste the following

ErrorDocument 500 http://yoursite/error.php?e=500
ErrorDocument 404 http://yoursite/error.php?e=404
ErrorDocument 401 http://yoursite/error.php?e=401
ErrorDocument 403 http://yoursite/error.php?e=403

(Remember to change "yoursite" to the url of your website) Save this as .htaccess

If the file editor saves it as something like .htaccess.txt Make sure to rename it and remove the .txt

Once you have saved it you can upload it to your sites root folder.

--- The error page ---

Now im going to show you how to use switch(), $_GET[''] and echo() in PHP . What we are going to do is very simple, so dont be scarred by the fact we are using PHP.

We are going to create a page that can be used for multiple purposes, depending in what = e in the URI.

Copy and paste this code into the text editor you used earlier

<?php
$errorCode = $_GET['e'];

switch($errorCode){
default :
$errorDescription = "Unspecified Error";
break;
case "401" :
$errorDescription = "Access to this resource requires Authorization";
break;
case "403" :
$errorDescription = "Access to this resource is forbidden";
break;
case "404" :
$errorDescription = "The page you requested could not be found";
break;
case "500" :
$errorDescription = "The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request";
break;

}
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title><?php echo"$errorCode"?> Error</title>
<style type="text/css">

</style>
</head>

<body>
<div id="errorBox">
<div id="errorCode"><?php echo "$errorCode";?></div>
<div id="errorDescription"><?php echo "$errorDescription";?></div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Save that as error.php and upload it to your root directory

That will check what e= in the URI and then will change the description depending on the error code specified in the URI.

To test if this works, in your internet browser, type your website followed by something like :
gdfgusdhfgsd0hgiofdghiosdghnuiofdghnsdofgidfg.php

So it would be something like :

http://yoursite.110mb.com/gdfgusdhfgsd0hgiofdghiosdghnuiofdghnsdofgidfg.php

Assuming you dont have a page called that you should be redirected to error.php?e=404

Thanks for reading this article And I hope you found it helpful