Name

<Directory> and <DirectoryMatch>

Synopsis

<Directory dir  >
...
</Directory>

The <Directory> directive allows you to apply other directives to a directory or a group of directories. It is important to understand that dir refers to absolute directories, so that <Directory /> operates on the whole filesystem, not the DocumentRoot and below. dir can include wildcards — that is, ? to match a single character, * to match a sequence, and [ ] to enclose a range of characters. For instance, [a-d] means “any one of a, b, c, d.” If the character ~ appears in front of dir, the name can consist of complete regular expressions.[4]

<DirectoryMatch> has the same effect as <Directory ~ >. That is, it expects a regular expression. So, for instance, either:

<Directory ~ /[a-d].*>

or:

<DirectoryMatch /[a-d].*>

means “any directory name in the root directory that starts with a, b, c, or d.”

[4] See Mastering Regular Expressions, by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl (O’Reilly & Associates, 2002).

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