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supercheetah
Asked: 2009-08-18 20:46:35 +0800 CST

Making Apache recognize MIME type of files without extension

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I have some old HTML files that were created elsewhere by someone else. Many of them don't, for some reason, have the .html extension on them. I don't want to have to change them if possible, but for some reason Apache can't seem to do any MIME magic to figure out their file type. I have the mime_magic mod enabled, along with the following in the sites section:

    MimeMagicFile /etc/magic

I should note that I'm using Debian Linux on this machine.

linux debian apache-2.2 mime

5 Answers

  1. I tried the DefaultType workaround in my main conf file and it did not work for me. (My environment is an internal, thoroughly hacked-up version of Apache, so there may be a FileInfo directive or something overriding DefaultType and I can't find it. On standard installations it may work...)

    What DID work: since all the extensionless files I'm dealing with are in one known directory, I added a Location block and used ForceType:

    <Location "/directoryname">
ForceType text/plain
</Location>

    You cannot use ForceType on a directory that should contain more than one type of file.

    • 6

  2. Assume all files not containing a period are PHP:

          <FilesMatch "^[^\.]+$">
              ForceType application/x-httpd-php
      </FilesMatch>
    • 5

  3. A simple warkaround, not really a solution maybe, would be to change the DefaultType as follows:

    DefaultType text/html

    This would assure every non recognized file will be treated as html.

    This is not a true solution, I repeat, but it is simple and may have sense if your server serves mainly html contents

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  4. The magic file path is /usr/share/file/magic in Debian. Change the configuration statement to

    MimeMagicFile /usr/share/file/magic

    If you open /etc/magic with a text editor, you can see the comment explaining that file(1) should use that file for your local magic definitions only.

    • 1

  5. It sounds to me that you are using the SYSTEM magic file when you want to be using the MIME magic file — as the name of the Apache configuration directive "MimeMagicFile" implies. Try this:

    MimeMagicFile /usr/share/mime/magic

    Of course, make sure that is the right path for your system — I don't have a Debian system to test with, but I would expect it to be there. Try locate mime/magic if you can't find it at the above location.

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