.htaccess "Options not allowed here"

Question

I have this in my .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks

And I get the following error in the apache error_log:

.htaccess: Options not allowed here

Here's the part from my httpd.conf file:

#htdocs symlinks here
<Directory /Users/you/code/my/folder>
    Options All
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

<Directory />
    Options All
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<Directory "/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs">
    Options All 
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

So I'm setting Options All and AllowOverride All everywhere, but STILL I'm not allowed to set the option. Can anyone make sense of this?

Thanks, MrB

Answer 1

Note that this is a XAMPP-specific issue. XAMPP loads some additional configuration files located in XAMPP/etc/extra/ that override httpd.conf. For me the offending file is http-userdir.conf which applies rules for ~user requests and contains the line AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes and changing that line to AllowOverride All did indeed solve my issue.

This only applies to files served from your /Sites/ directory on OS X. I don't know if the Windows version uses UserDir at all or even has a similar rule.