How to add a html header to all html pages of a folder automatically with htaccess?

Question

I tried this

Options +Indexes
IndexOptions FancyIndexing VersionSort NameWidth=* HTMLTable Charset=UTF-8
HeaderName /header.html
ReadmeName /footer.html
IndexIgnore header.html footer.html .htaccess

How To Include a PHP File Site-wide Using .HTACCESS or other methods

Apply .htaccess HeaderName to all lower levels?

How To Include a PHP File Site-wide Using .HTACCESS or other methods

It just simply does not do anything. I also followed an old guide to enable Layout Header (something with mod_layout in apache) but it seems it's too old.

The best i managed to do is to show the content of my "header.html" into the directory (which is listed with Option +Indexes)

I am doing all of this in a specific folder .htaccess, not in the root .htaccess It looks like this :

Options +Indexes

IndexOptions IgnoreCase FancyIndexing FoldersFirst NameWidth=* DescriptionWidth=* SuppressHTMLPreamble HeaderName header.html

Please, help

What are you trying to do specifically? What type of header of your trying to send? — Panama Jack

Jon Story Jon Story · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-09T16:07:57

I think you're confusing HTTP Headers with a HTML "Header" (meaning the top of the page)

A HTTP header is used to define things like the encoding, content type (eg JSON/XML), not to add HTML to the top of another HTML page.

If you want to add HTML to the top of each page, .htaccess isn't the place to do this - you need to use some kind of scripting/programming language (eg ASP/PHP) to include the files.

Note that none of the three SO questions you link do what you want either:

How To Include a PHP File Site-wide Using .HTACCESS or other methods and How To Include a PHP File Site-wide Using .HTACCESS or other methods both use PHP to include the files (and just use htaccess to tell PHP where to find the files).
Apply .htaccess HeaderName to all lower levels? as you discovered, adds the header to the Apache directory listing page only, not to every page on your site.

How to add a html header to all html pages of a folder automatically with htaccess?

2 Answers