<
p>Content Negotiation then selects the appropriate language
version of a particular error message text, honoring the
language preferences passed in the client's request. (Users
usually select their favorite languages in the preferences
options menu of today's browsers). When an error document in
the client's primary language version is unavailable, the
secondary languages are tried or a default (fallback) version
<
p>You have full flexibility in designing your error documents
to your personal taste (or your company's conventions). For
demonstration purposes, we present a simple generic error
document scheme. For this hypothetic server, we assume that all
<
li>possibly are served by different virtual hosts (different
host name, different IP address, or different port) on the
<
li>show a predefined company logo in the right top of the
message (selectable by virtual host),</
li>
<
li>print the error title first, followed by an explanatory
text and (depending on the error context) help on how to
<
li>have some kind of standardized background image,</
li>
<
li>display an apache logo and a feedback email address at
the bottom of the error message.</
li>
<
p>An example of a "document not found" message for a german
client might look like this:<
br />
alt="[Needs graphics capability to display]" /><
br />
All links in the document as well as links to the server's
administrator mail address, and even the name and port of the
serving virtual host are inserted in the error document at
"run-time", <
em>
i.e.</
em>, when the error actually occurs.</
p>
<
h2><
a id="createdir" name="createdir">Creating an
ErrorDocument directory</
a></
h2>
For this concept to work as easily as possible, we must take
advantage of as much server support as we can get:
enable the language selection of the most appropriate
language alternative (content negotiation).</
li>
directive we define a set of default fallback languages in
the situation where the client's browser did not express any
Includes</
a> (and disallowing execution of cgi scripts for
security reasons), we allow the server to include building
blocks of the error message, and to substitute the value of
certain environment variables into the generated document
(dynamic HTML) or even to conditionally include or omit parts
are useful for automatically XSSI-expanding all files with a
<
samp>.shtml</
samp> suffix to <
em>
text/
html</
em>.</
li>
keep the error document directory outside of the document
tree because it can be regarded more as a server part than
part of the document tree.</
li>
restricts these "special" settings to the error document
directory and avoids an impact on any of the settings for the
regular document tree.</
li>
<
li>For each of the error codes to be handled (see RFC2068
for an exact description of each error code, or look at
apache's standard messages), an <
a the aliased <
samp>/errordocs</
samp> directory is defined.
Note that we only define the basename of the document here
because the MultiViews option will select the best candidate
based on the language suffixes and the client's preferences.
Any error situation with an error code <
em>not</
em> handled
by a custom document will be dealt with by the server in the
standard way (<
em>
i.e.</
em>, a plain error message in
directive tells apache that it is not necessary to look for a
.htaccess file in the /errordocs directory: a minor speed
The resulting <
samp>
httpd.conf</
samp> configuration would then
look similar to this: <
small>(Note that you can define your own
error messages using this method for only part of the document
tree,
e.g., a /~user/ subtree. In this case, the configuration
could as well be put into the .htaccess file at the root of the
subtree, and the <Directory> and </Directory>
directives -but not the contained directives- must be
LanguagePriority en fr de
Options MultiViews IncludesNoExec FollowSymLinks
<FilesMatch "\.shtml[.$]">
# "401 Authorization Required",
# "500 Internal Server Error",
The directory for the error messages (here:
with the appropriate permissions (readable and executable by
the server uid or gid, only writable for the administrator).
<
h3><
a id="docnames" name="docnames">Naming the individual
error document files</
a></
h3>
By defining the <
samp>MultiViews</
samp> option, the server was
told to automatically scan the directory for matching variants
(looking at language and content type suffixes) when a
requested document was not found. In the configuration, we
defined the names for the error documents to be just their
error number (without any suffix).
<
p>The names of the individual error documents are now
determined like this (I'm using 403 as an example, think of it
as a placeholder for any of the configured error
be found and served (with the DefaultType, usually
text/
plain), all negotiation would be bypassed.</
li>
<
li>For each language for which we have an internationalized
version (note that this need not be the same set of languages
for each error code - you can get by with a single language
version until you actually <
em>have</
em> translated
filled with the error text in that language (<
a href="#createdocs">see below</
a>).</
li>
<
li>One fallback document called
creating a symlink to the default language variant (<
a href="#fallback">see below</
a>).</
li>
<
h3><
a id="headfoot" name="headfoot">The common header and
By putting as much layout information in two special "include
files", the error documents can be reduced to a bare minimum.
<
p>One of these layout files defines the HTML document header
and a configurable list of paths to the icons to be shown in
the resulting error document. These paths are exported as a set
of XSSI environment variables and are later evaluated by the
"footer" special file. The title of the current error (which is
put into the TITLE tag and an H1 header) is simply passed in
from the main error document in a variable called
<
code>title</
code>.<
br />
<
strong>By changing this file, the layout of all generated
error messages can be changed in a second.</
strong> (By
exploiting the features of XSSI, you can easily define
different layouts based on the current virtual host, or even
based on the client's domain name).</
p>
<
p>The second layout file describes the footer to be displayed
at the bottom of every error message. In this example, it shows
an apache logo, the current server time, the server version
string and adds a mail reference to the site's webmaster.</
p>
<
p>For simplicity, the header file is simply called
<
code>
head.shtml</
code> because it contains server-parsed
content but no language specific information. The footer file
exists once for each language translation, plus a symlink for
the default language.</
p>
<
p><
strong>Example:</
strong> for English, French and German
versions (default english)<
br />
<
p>Both files are included into the error document by using the
directives <
code><!--#include virtual="head" --></
code>
and <
code><!--#include virtual="foot" --></
code>
respectively: the rest of the magic occurs in mod_negotiation
<
p>See <
a href="#listings">the listings below</
a> to see an
actual HTML implementation of the discussed example.</
p>
<
h3><
a id="createdocs" name="createdocs">Creating
ErrorDocuments in different languages</
a></
h3>
After all this preparation work, little remains to be said
about the actual documents. They all share a simple common
<!--#set var="title" value="<
em>error description title</
em>" -->
<!--#include virtual="head" -->
<
em>explanatory error text</
em>
<!--#include virtual="foot" -->
In the <
a href="#listings">listings section</
a>, you can see an
example of a [400 Bad Request] error document. Documents as
simple as that certainly cause no problems to translate or
<
h3><
a id="fallback" name="fallback">The fallback
Do we need a special handling for languages other than those we
have translations for? We did set the LanguagePriority, didn't
<
p>Well, the LanguagePriority directive is for the case where
the client does not express any language priority at all. But
what happens in the situation where the client wants one of the
languages we do not have, and none of those we do have?</
p>
<
p>Without doing anything, the Apache server will usually
return a [406 no acceptable variant] error, listing the choices
from which the client may select. But we're in an error message
already, and important error information might get lost when
the client had to choose a language representation first.</
p>
<
p>So, in this situation it appears to be easier to define a
fallback language (by copying or linking, <
em>
e.g.</
em>, the
english version to a language-less version). Because the
negotiation algorithm prefers "more specialized" variants over
"more generic" variants, these generic alternatives will only
be chosen when the normal negotiation did not succeed.</
p>
<
p>A simple shell script to do it (execute within the
ln -s $f `basename $f .en`
<
h2><
a id="proxy" name="proxy">Customizing Proxy Error
<
p>As of Apache-1.3, it is possible to use the
<
code>ErrorDocument</
code> mechanism for proxy error messages
as well (previous versions always returned fixed predefined
<
p>Most proxy errors return an error code of [500 Internal
Server Error]. To find out whether a particular error document
was invoked on behalf of a proxy error or because of some other
server error, and what the reason for the failure was, you can
check the contents of the new <
code>ERROR_NOTES</
code> CGI
environment variable: if invoked for a proxy error, this
variable will contain the actual proxy error message text in
<
p>The following excerpt demonstrates how to exploit the
<
code>ERROR_NOTES</
code> variable within an error document:</
p>
<!--#if expr="$REDIRECT_ERROR_NOTES = ''" -->
The server encountered an unexpected condition
which prevented it from fulfilling the request.
<A HREF="mailto:<!--#echo var="SERVER_ADMIN" -->"
SUBJECT="Error message [<!--#echo var="REDIRECT_STATUS" -->] <!--#echo var="title" --> for <!--#echo var="REQUEST_URI" -->">
Please forward this error screen to <!--#echo var="SERVER_NAME" -->'s
WebMaster</A>; it includes useful debugging information about
the Request which caused the error.
<pre><!--#printenv --></pre>
<!--#echo var="REDIRECT_ERROR_NOTES" -->
<
h2><
a id="listings" name="listings">HTML listing of the
discussed example</
a></
h2>
So, to summarize our example, here's the complete listing of
the <
samp>
400.shtml.en</
samp> document. You will notice that it
contains almost nothing but the error text (with conditional
additions). Starting with this example, you will find it easy
to add more error documents, or to translate the error
documents to different languages.
<!--#set var="title" value="Bad Request"
--><!--#include virtual="head" --><P>
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand:
<STRONG><!--#echo var="REQUEST_URI" --></STRONG>
The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed
syntax. The client should not repeat the request without
<!--#if expr="$HTTP_REFERER != ''" -->
Please inform the owner of
<A HREF="<!--#echo var="HTTP_REFERER" -->">the referring page</A> about
Please check your request for typing errors and retry.
<!--#include virtual="foot" -->
Here is the complete <
samp>
head.shtml</
samp> file (the funny
line breaks avoid empty lines in the document after XSSI
processing). Note the configuration section at top. That's
where you configure the images and logos as well as the apache
documentation directory. Look how this file displays two
different logos depending on the content of the virtual host
name ($SERVER_NAME), and that an animated apache logo is shown
if the browser appears to support it (the latter requires
server configuration lines of the form <
br />
<
code>BrowserMatch "^Mozilla/[2-4]" anigif</
code><
br />
for browser types which support animated GIFs).
<!--#if expr="$SERVER_NAME = /.*\.mycompany\.com/"
--><!--#set var="IMG_CorpLogo"
--><!--#set var="ALT_CorpLogo" value="Powered by Linux!"
--><!--#set var="IMG_CorpLogo"
--><!--#set var="ALT_CorpLogo" value="Powered by Linux!"
--><!--#if expr="$anigif"
--><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
[<!--#echo var="REDIRECT_STATUS" -->] <!--#echo var="title" -->
<BODY BGCOLOR="white" BACKGROUND="<!--#echo var="IMG_BgImage" -->"><UL>
<H1 ALIGN="center">
[<!--#echo var="REDIRECT_STATUS" -->] <!--#echo var="title" -->
<IMG SRC="<!--#echo var="IMG_CorpLogo" -->"
ALT="<!--#echo var="ALT_CorpLogo" -->" ALIGN=right>
<HR><!-- ======================================================== -->
<DIV ALIGN="right"><SMALL><SUP>Local Server time:
<!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL" -->
</SUP></SMALL></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="center">
<A HREF="<!--#echo var="DOC_Apache" -->">
<IMG SRC="<!--#echo var="IMG_Apache" -->" BORDER=0 ALIGN="bottom"
ALT="Powered by <!--#echo var="SERVER_SOFTWARE" -->"></A><BR>
<SMALL><SUP><!--#set var="var"
value="Powered by $SERVER_SOFTWARE -- File last modified on $LAST_MODIFIED"
--><!--#echo var="var" --></SUP></SMALL>
<ADDRESS>If the indicated error looks like a misconfiguration, please inform
<A HREF="mailto:<!--#echo var="SERVER_ADMIN" -->"
SUBJECT="Feedback about Error message [<!--#echo var="REDIRECT_STATUS"
-->] <!--#echo var="title" -->, req=<!--#echo var="REQUEST_URI" -->">
<!--#echo var="SERVER_NAME" -->'s WebMaster</A>.
If you have tips to contribute, send mail to <
a href="mailto:martin@apache.org">martin@apache.org</
a>
