Most folks use the directory as the root of an organized hierarchy of directories. For more information on some of the dynamic content generators I mention here, visit the Resources section at the end of this article. The ScriptAlias directive indicates that anything in the specified directory should be run as a program rather than simply sent to the browser as a file. Behind the scenes, the web server is looking in the document root directory for the file specified in the DirectoryIndex directive to display by default. If you're used to the Windows three-character file suffix limit or are in an environment where some folks will be editing documents for online publication under Windows and uploading these to your server, you might use index.htm as your default.
Some servers assume a default.html or default.htm document.
DirectoryIndex index.php index.cgi index.html default.html Amble Over And thus ends our brief amble through the Apache server configuration file. I may have glossed over a few topics that interest you, so I'll end by suggesting several excellent tutorials and detailed documentation already available on the Web. This article should in no way be considered a comprehensive tutorial. When it comes to security and performance, almost everything's situation-specific. As always, if you'd like me to cover anything in particular in this column, feel free to post your suggestions to the O'Reilly Network Apache Forum .