This guide is for you if you are encountering a 500 error, which can have various causes generally related to the development of your website on a Web Hosting service, particularly with the rewrites in your .htaccess files.

Introduction

• Apache2, which is installed on the servers, no longer supports certain modules such as mod_auth_anon, mod_auth_dbm, mod_authz_dbm, mod_cern_meta, mod_imap, mod_imagemap, mod_mime_magic.
• Apache2 is strict about syntax errors, and when it encounters syntax errors in a .htaccess file, this can lead to 500 Internal Server Error errors or unexpected URL rewriting errors.

Examples of syntax and correction

In this first example, the syntax error is that the rewrite rule does not specify the HTTP redirection response code to return.

RewriteRule ^articles/([0-9]+)/$ /article.php?id=$1 [L]

The correction adds the R=301 directive to specify that the redirection should return a 301 (permanent) code:

RewriteRule ^articles/([0-9]+)/$ /article.php?id=$1 [L,R=301]

In this second example, the syntax error is that the Options directive does not correctly specify the options to enable or disable.

Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks

The correction adds the "+" sign to specify that FollowSymLinks should be enabled rather than disabled:

Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks

Troubleshooting these errors

• If the first page or another page displays a 500 error, rename the .htaccess file or comment out all lines with # and uncomment line by line until you find the section that is causing the problem.
• If the error occurs after a modification made to one of your pages, the easiest solution is to restore the previous version of the file.