Redirect if a website root is empty?

Posted by Steve on Thu 6 Mar 2008 at 00:15

This should be a simple problem to solve, but I've yet to find a good solution, so any assistance would be most welcome. If you'd like to redirect to another website if a directory root has no files in it, how would you do so?

Assume that you have an Apache virtual host which has a directory root with no files within it. In that case it would be nice to redirect to a new location with a message such as "there are no files here yet".

The naive approach would be to have something like this:

# Excluding existing files and folders
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d

# and if there is nothing in the root redirect
RewriteRule ^/$ http://www.steve.org.uk/

Unfortunately this does not work, and I'm out of ideas..


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