Show 404 error page from PHP file, without redirecting

Question

I have a file secret.php which is included in index.php and I want to show a 404 error page when someone tries to access secret.php directly. But

header("Location: this_site_certainly_does_not_exist");

in secure.php is not a solution, because I want the URL the user typed (e.g. example.com/secret.php) to be visible in the browser's URL bar when the error page is shown, instead of redirecting.

Answer 1

You can do it with headers.

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");

then you can add your 404 page using for example readfile method.

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
echo "<h1>404 Not Found</h1>";
echo "The page that you have requested could not be found.";
exit();