First of all, let’s talk about XAMPP a bit. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.

There are three types of distribution (Windows, Linux and Mac). I am not going to discuss anything about XAMPP, I think that with a visit to their site you will all the info required to install and run this wonderful package.

What I want to concentrate on is that when trying to use a regular .htaccess in a specific folder, Apache fires a beautiful and really annoying (it is not very well explained why this error happens when it happens) 500 Internal Error.

Finding the problem

Well, I went to the httpd.conf file to see what was going on and found the problem. The problem is that XAMPP Apache version has a very strict security on allowing users to modify its default settings -and its default settings are AllowOverride None:

AllowOverride AuthConfig

Solution

Just go to the Directory directive and change AllowOverride AuthConfig to AllowOverride All and thats it.

<Directory "/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/htdocs">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI Includes
#
# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
#   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
# AllowOverride AuthConfig
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
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