Custom 404 error issues with Apache - the ErrorDocument is 404 as well

Question

I am trying to create a custom 404 error for my website. I am testing this out using XAMPP on Windows.

My directory structure is as follows:

error\404page.html index.php .htaccess 

The content of my .htaccess file is:

ErrorDocument 404 error\404page.html 

This produces the following result:

However this is not working - is it something to do with the way the slashes are or how I should be referencing the error document?

site site documents reside in a in a sub folder of the web root if that makes any difference to how I should reference?

When I change the file to be

ErrorDocument 404 /error/404page.html 

I receive the following error message which isn't what is inside the html file I have linked - but it is different to what is listed above:

Answer 1

The ErrorDocument directive, when supplied a local URL path, expects the path to be fully qualified from the DocumentRoot. In your case, this means that the actual path to the ErrorDocument is

ErrorDocument 404 /JinPortfolio/error/404page.html 

When you corrected it in your second try, the reason you see that page instead is because http://localhost/error/404page.html doesn't exist, hence the bit about there being a 404 error in locating the error handling document.

Answer 2

.htaccess files are disabled by default in Apache these days, due to performance issues. When .htaccess files are enabled, the web server must check for it on every hit in every subdirectory from where it resides.

Just figured it was important to note. If you want to turn on .htaccess files anyway, here's a link that explains it:

http://www.tildemark.com/enable-htaccess-on-apache/