Accessing outside DocumentRoot files in Apache HTTP server

I don’t know a bit about Apache HTTP server but faced one issue in office…so thought about writing it here ;)

We are having a 3 tier setup where Oracle Application Server 10g was there on AIX 5.3. It runs Apache HTTP server and we needed to access the files outside DocumentRoot. A bit of googling revealed that we could use Alias for that. Basically we need to add the following small piece of text to httpd.conf file:

[sourcecode language=‘css’] Alias /test1/ “/home/sidhu/test1/”

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all [/sourcecode]

Now we should be able to access the files in /home/sidhu/test1 by hitting the following URL

http://server:port/test1/filename.html

PS: I couldn’t find the reason but it didn’t allow me to use word “reports” in the directory name.