.htaccess headers being ignored by Apache

Question

I have a website that uses the same core .htaccess details as many other websites; however this website does not properly load the .htaccess directives

Answer 1

It seems that PHP ignores headers defined in .htaccess when working as a FastCGI module.

There are a lot of suggestions how to fix this. In your case I would recommend to have a file that defines all your headers

and save it to your DocumentRoot directory. Then add this entry to your .htaccess file to include it with every request:

php_value auto_prepend_file /var/www/html/headers.php     

Testing it:

And the headers are being sent:

$ curl -I ubuntu-server.lan/test.php
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2018 09:37:52 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu)
Cache-Control: no-cache,must-revalidate
X-Clacks-Overhead: "GNU Terry Pratchett"
X-XSS-Protection: 1;mode=block
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Expect-CT: enforce,max-age=2592000
Content-Language: en
Referrer-Policy: origin-when-cross-origin
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Always keep in mind that when you change headers in .htaccess to also change them in headers.php.

Hope this helps!

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➥ previous answer

I think this problem results from the httpd/apache2 headers_module not being loaded correctly (although you state otherwise in one of the above comments). You can check this by executing this command in the terminal:

apachectl -M | grep headers_module

If you get no output headers_module (shared) (or similar), then you have to activate the httpd/apache2 headers module. On a CentOS system you have to load the respective source file in your configuration (default /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf).

You have to add this line

LoadModule headers_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_headers.so

and then restart the http server wih sudo systemctl restart httpd.service

With EasyApache 4 the folder where httpd/apache2 modules are located might differ and be /usr/lib64/apache2/modules/.

I hope this helps!