.htaccess in home directory brought down all my sites

Submitted by Darren Oh on

This afternoon, most of the sites running on my computer started responding with “500 Internal Server Error”. The Apache error log showed the following error:

[Tue Jul 19 16:17:01.418642 2016] [core:alert] [pid 79692] [client 127.0.0.1:53041] /Users/darren/.htaccess: <IfModule not allowed here

I couldn’t find anything wrong with the .htaccess files or any changes to the server configuration. Finally, I noticed that the .htaccess file was not in the site directory. I had accidentally copied a site to my home directory earlier in the day, and missed the hidden .htaccess file when I was cleaning up. Removing it brought the sites back up.

Before this, I had assumed that Apache wouldn’t check .htaccess files outside a site’s document root directory.