Making Apache recognize MIME type of files without extension

Question

I have some old HTML files that were created elsewhere by someone else. Many of them don't, for some reason, have the .html extension on them. I don't want to have to change them if possible, but for some reason Apache can't seem to do any MIME magic to figure out their file type. I have the mime_magic mod enabled, along with the following in the sites section:

    MimeMagicFile /etc/magic

I should note that I'm using Debian Linux on this machine.

Is the file `/etc/magic` actually the right location on your system for the MIME magic file? — David Z, Aug 18 '09 at 05:16
Mind that mod_mime_magic only kicks in if mod_mime does not find a MIME type for a file. In case of no extension, mod_mime finds *many* MIME types from /etc/mime.types, causing mod_mime_magic to not ever being called, but also not *one* type being determined. — Dominik George, Mar 03 '17 at 11:09

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 15 '09 at 22:05

I tried the DefaultType workaround in my main conf file and it did not work for me. (My environment is an internal, thoroughly hacked-up version of Apache, so there may be a FileInfo directive or something overriding DefaultType and I can't find it. On standard installations it may work...)

What DID work: since all the extensionless files I'm dealing with are in one known directory, I added a Location block and used ForceType:

<Location "/directoryname">
ForceType text/plain
</Location>

You cannot use ForceType on a directory that should contain more than one type of file.

score 5 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 05 '12 at 12:06

5

Assume all files not containing a period are PHP:

      <FilesMatch "^[^\.]+$">
              ForceType application/x-httpd-php
      </FilesMatch>

edited Nov 05 '12 at 12:06

TRiG

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answered Nov 26 '09 at 05:52

drAlberT · Answer 3 · 2009-09-01T17:36:59.587

2

A simple warkaround, not really a solution maybe, would be to change the DefaultType as follows:

DefaultType text/html

This would assure every non recognized file will be treated as html.

This is not a true solution, I repeat, but it is simple and may have sense if your server serves mainly html contents

edited Sep 01 '09 at 17:36

answered Aug 18 '09 at 07:46

drAlberT

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score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Nov 05 '12 at 12:12

1

The magic file path is /usr/share/file/magic in Debian. Change the configuration statement to

MimeMagicFile /usr/share/file/magic

If you open /etc/magic with a text editor, you can see the comment explaining that file(1) should use that file for your local magic definitions only.

edited Nov 05 '12 at 12:12

TRiG

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answered Aug 18 '09 at 13:02

hayalci

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It seems like this should work, but Apache is still giving text/html for those files, and I just double checked to make sure the file is there. – supercheetah Aug 18 '09 at 17:16
oops, I mean text/plain – supercheetah Aug 18 '09 at 17:17
Actually, I think I take that back. It might be something with Firefox because I just checked this with Chromium, and it seemed to work just fine. – supercheetah Aug 18 '09 at 17:19
And that only seems to be on some files. – supercheetah Aug 18 '09 at 18:31

score 0 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 05 '12 at 12:12

It sounds to me that you are using the SYSTEM magic file when you want to be using the MIME magic file — as the name of the Apache configuration directive "MimeMagicFile" implies. Try this:

MimeMagicFile /usr/share/mime/magic

Of course, make sure that is the right path for your system — I don't have a Debian system to test with, but I would expect it to be there. Try locate mime/magic if you can't find it at the above location.

Making Apache recognize MIME type of files without extension

5 Answers5

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