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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Assume all files not containing a period are PHP:

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

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.