Is there a way to force apache to return 404 instead of 403?

Is there a way how I can configure the Apache web server to return a 404 (not found) error code instead of 403 (forbidden) for some specific directories which I want to disallow to be accessed?

I found some solutions suggesting the use of mod_rewrite, like e.g.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*$ /404 [L]

As the purpose of sending 404 instead of 403 is to obfuscate the directory structure, this solution is too revealing, because it redirects to some different location which makes it obvious that the directory originally accessed does in fact exist.

Solution 1:

RedirectMatch as in e.g.

RedirectMatch 404 /\.

does the trick, it prohibits access to all files or directories starting with a dot, giving a "404 Not Found" error.

From the Apache manual: "The Redirect[Match] directive maps an old URL into a new one by asking the client to refetch the resource at the new location." By default, Redirect sends a 302 return code, but it can also return other status codes as shown above.

Solution 2:

You can make something like this:

.htaccess

ErrorDocument 403 /error/404.php

404.php

<?php
$status = $_SERVER['REDIRECT_STATUS'] = 404;
header( $_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'] . ' ' . $status);
?>

404 Error

Solution 3:

After having the same problem, I ended up with the following .htaccess file

Options -Indexes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ - [R=404,NC]

The 1st and 3rd line ensure that you can't list the folder content, and if you do it you will receive a 404 error. The RewriteCond directive ensures that this rewrite rule only applies to main domain. Since I have several subdomains, without the rewritecond, accessing www.mydomain.com/subdomain was also returning a 404, which was not what I intended.

Solution 4:

In my opinion making this task in .htaccess is quite ugly solution.

It is possible to make it in apache configuration. Take a look:

Add to your apache config:

ErrorDocument 403 /404

Then restart apache:

service apache2 restart

That is all.