Solve an error 500 "Internal Server error"

This guide concerns you if you get a error 500 which may have various origins generally related to the development of your site on a Web hosting, in particular with the rewrites of your files .htaccess.

Preamble

• Apache2, in place on servers, no longer supports certain modules like mod_auth_anon, mod_auth_dbm, mod_authz_dbm, mod_cern_meta, mod_imap, mod_imagemap, mod_mime_magic
• Apache2 is strict on syntax errors and when it encounters syntax errors in a file .htaccess, this may result in 500 Internal Server Errors or unexpected URL rewrite errors
   

Examples of syntax and correction

In this first example, the syntax error is that the rewrite rule does not specify the HTTP redirect response code to return.

RewriteRule ^articles/([0-9]+)/$ /article.php?id=$1 [L]

The correction adds the Directive R=301 to specify that the redirection must return a code 301 (permanent):

RewriteRule ^articles/([0-9]+)/$ /article.php?id=$1 [L,R=301]

In this second example, the syntax error is that the directive Options does not correctly specify the options to be enabled or disabled.

Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks

The correction adds the sign "+" to specify that FollowSymLinks shall be activated rather than deactivated:

Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks

Solve these errors

• If the first page or another page shows an error 500, rename the file .htaccess or comment on all lines with # and devoluntarily line by line until you find the passage that is a problem.
• If the error occurs after a modification made on one of your pages, the simplest is to restore the previous version of the file.