For every website, you will eventually need to change the default index page to the home page of your website/blog. In this article, we will look at how to change default index page in Apache Web Server.
How To Change Default Index Page in Apache Web Server
Here are the steps to change default index page in Apache web server. You can change default index page via Apache Server configuration file, or using .htaccess file. We will look at both approaches below.
Change default index page using Apache Configuration
Apache configuration file is present at one of the following locations depending on your installation:
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf/etc/apache2/apache2.conf/etc/httpd/httpd.conf/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Open terminal and run the following command to open Apache configuration file
$ sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
Also read : How to Change Timezone in Apache/PHP
You will see the following lines of code.
#
# DirectoryIndex: sets the file that Apache will serve if a directory
# is requested.
#
<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
</IfModule>
Change index.html index.php to your choice of web page (e.g home.html).
<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex home.html
</IfModule>
Make sure you have placed this file home.html at /var/www/html/. If you have placed it in a different folder (e.g /var/www/html/product/) then modify the path above accordingly (e.g /product/home.html).
<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex /product/home.html
</IfModule>
You can also add multiple index pages to Apache as shown below
<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex home.html welcome.html
</IfModule>
Restart Apache web server to apply changes.
$ sudo service apache2 restart
Also read : How to Install mod_security on CentOS 7
Change default index page using .htaccess
You can also change default index page for Apache using .htaccess. Before proceeding, please enable mod_rewrite (.htaccess) in your Apache web server.
Open .htaccess file, typically located at /var/www/html/.htaccess
$ sudo vi /var/www/html/.htaccess
Also read : How to Set Up Virtual Hosts in Apache
Add the following line to .htaccess file to set index page to home.html.
DirectoryIndex home.html
Restart Apache web server to apply changes.
$ sudo service apache2 restart
That’s it. Open browser and visit http://your_server_or_ip and you will see the new page. Replace your_server_or_ip with your domain name, or server IP address.
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