How do I change the default index page in Apache?

Solution 1:

I recommend using .htaccess. You only need to add:

DirectoryIndex home.php

or whatever page name you want to have for it.

EDIT: basic htaccess tutorial.

1) Create .htaccess file in the directory where you want to change the index file.

• no extension
• . in front, to ensure it is a "hidden" file

Enter the line above in there. There will likely be many, many other things you will add to this (AddTypes for webfonts / media files, caching for headers, gzip declaration for compression, etc.), but that one line declares your new "home" page.

2) Set server to allow reading of .htaccess files (may only be needed on your localhost, if your hosting servce defaults to allow it as most do)

Assuming you have access, go to your server's enabled site location. I run a Debian server for development, and the default site setup is at /etc/apache2/sites-available/default for Debian / Ubuntu. Not sure what server you run, but just search for "sites-available" and go into the "default" document. In there you will see an entry for Directory. Modify it to look like this:

<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
</Directory>

Then restart your apache server. Again, not sure about your server, but the command on Debian / Ubuntu is:

sudo service apache2 restart

Technically you only need to reload, but I restart just because I feel safer with a full refresh like that.

Once that is done, your site should be reading from your .htaccess file, and you should have a new default home page! A side note, if you have a sub-directory that runs a site (like an admin section or something) and you want to have a different "home page" for that directory, you can just plop another .htaccess file in that sub-site's root and it will overwrite the declaration in the parent.

Solution 2:

You can also set DirectoryIndex in apache's httpd.conf file.

CentOS keeps this file in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf Debian: /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Open the file in your text editor and find the line starting with DirectoryIndex

To load landing.html as a default (but index.html if that's not found) change this line to read:

DirectoryIndex  landing.html index.html

Solution 3:

I had a similar problem. When providing http://server/appDirectory I got a directory listing instead of index.html even though I had

<IfModule dir_module>
    DirectoryIndex index.php index.html 
</IfModule>

in my httpd.conf file.

My solution was to uncomment the

LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so

line in httpd.conf

Apache version: 2.4