Check AllowOverride value using PHP?

Question

Is there anyway to use PHP to check the value of AllowOverride too see if .htaccess will have any effect?

Answer 1

I am not aware of a clean, direct way to do this.

If you have http access to the folder you want to check this for, you could write something into the .htaccess file that will trigger a certain kind of output.

For example, you could set a header (this has an added dependency on mod_headers, though):

<FilesMatch "\.(php)$">
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set htaccess_works "yes"
</IfModule>
</FilesMatch>

then make a request from PHP, and check the response headers, e.g. using curl's CURLOPT_HEADER. If they contain the htaccess_works header, it works.

Another method that is terrible but guaranteed to work independently from specific Apache modules is to programmatically write gibberish into the .htaccess file, then to make a curl request like above, and to check for a 500 status code. If it throws a 500, the .htaccess file got interpreted. But as said, this is terrible - if possible, go with the headers method instead.