disabling request for (valid resource)/.htaccess in apache 2.4

Question

Ok, lets say I have a normal text file on my server in the document root. Suppose the folder on the system assigned to document root is /doc. The filename will be a.txt (stored as /doc/a.txt) The folder is setup to allow Apache configuration from a .htaccess file.

This is my main server httpd.conf file relevant to the /doc folder:

<Directory "/doc">
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks -multiviews
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Assuming my public domain is http://www.example.com, I request http://www.example.com/a.txt to download the file.

I then look behind the scenes on the server side with strace.

It looks normal when Apache wants to load /doc/.htaccess (.htaccess from the document root folder), but it's also trying to load /doc/a.txt/.htaccess as well.

Why would Apache append .htaccess to the entire resource and request it to exist on the server? And how do I disable only that scan for .htaccess?

For clarity: searching for /doc/.htaccess is fine, but searching for /doc/a.txt/.htaccess is unacceptable.

Answer 1

<Directory "/doc">
:
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

This allows .htaccess overrides for the entire file-path. This includes the directory /doc and all subdirectories.

An inefficiency of allowing .htaccess overrides is that the .htaccess file is scanned for in all possible subdirectories along the URL/file-path.

The scanning for .htaccess files occurs very early, so when you make a request for /a.txt it doesn't yet know whether that request maps to a directory or not.

You could perhaps avoid the additional scanning of "subdirectories" and restrict the use of .htaccess files to the root only by including an additional <Directory> container that prevents .htaccess overrides for /doc/<something>/ and everything below. For example:

<Directory "/doc/*">
AllowOverride None
</Directory>

This should go after your existing <Directory "/doc"> container.

Or, use a regular expression instead:

<DirectoryMatch "^/doc/.">
AllowOverride None
</Directory>