How to solve: Apache error .htaccess: Option MultiViews not allowed here

How to solve: Apache error .htaccess: Option MultiViews not allowed here

I turned on some .htaccess rules in order for the cache to perform faster but unfortunately it came with some unintended consequences: A bunch of 500 error pages and in the log files one of the errors was [Core:Alert] /../.htaccess:Option MultiViews not allowed here. This one in particular happened when using W3T Total Cache plugin on the wordpress/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/Technology.Bauzas.com/.htaccess route.

The reason Option MultiViews not allowed here is because changing configuration settings via .htaccess files is disabled for security reasons by default. If you get an Internal Server Error screen shown on your browser (or 500 error page) and you have the message “htaccess: Option MultiViews not allowed here” in your Apache error.log (ususally found at /var/log/apache2/error.log), you will need to enable support for it via the virtual host config file. Now, this is an option that is part of the AllowOverride Options but it has a trick to it, you need to include the MultiViews directive which do not come included by default.

Now, this will catch a lot of people off guard. Sometimes we find a lot of convenience in using AllowOverride All and assume that as it suggests, all Overrides would be allowed. In the case of MultiViews AllowOverride All won’t do the trick.

You need to add or update the line AllowOverride to include Options=All,MultiViews to your Apache virtual host, the vhost configuration file should then look like:

<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride Indexes Options=All,MultiViews
Order allow,deny 
allow from all 
</Directory>

If you had other AllowOverride directives you only need to add the Options=All,MultiViews one. The order I think does not matter. In this example Indexes is assumed to be already in use so we only added Options=All,MultiViews.