[conspire] (forw) Re: Your web-site Causes Firefox to Download the Pages Instead of Viewing Them

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:27:09 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il>
Subject: Re: Your web-site Causes Firefox to Download the Pages Instead of
	Viewing Them
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Shlomi Fish (shlomif at iglu.org.il):

> your web-site causes firefox to download the pages instead of viewing
> them in the browser's viewport. 

OK, fixed.

It's a rather subtle and unexpected bit of breakage that occurred
silently in consequence of the upgrade from Apache httpd version 2.2.9 
to 2.2.16 on Debian.

It's necessary to add the following line to the Directory section of
/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/userdir.conf :

  DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm index.shtml index.cgi

This is separate and in addition to needing a DirectoryIndex line in
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf .  That addition to userdir.conf has never been
necessary before.

After doing so, the sysadmin must (1) restart Apache httpd, and (2)
clear the browser cache, or you, the sysadmin affected by this
gratuitous breakage, won't realise you've just fixed the problem, and
will think it's still broken.

So, if anyone is still getting "You have chosen to open [blank line], which
is a PHTML file.  What should Firefox do with this file?" [etc.]
dialogues when trying to load userdir html files at URLs such as 

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/
http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/

...and subdirectories thereof, you need to _clear your browser cache_.


----- End forwarded message -----