tl;dr
Yes it's the correct way.
But to be more semantic: Yes, it's the correct way to allow .htaccess
to override all directives in the /var/www
directory.
As you found out, AllowOverride
is allowed only under the Directory
section.
Using your example:
<Directory "/var/www">
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
This is telling apache, that all configurations can be overridden in the /var/www
and all its sub-directories (recursively).
For a better example, consider you have the following configuration in your virtual host:
<Directory "/var/www">
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<Directory "/var/www/uploads">
AllowOverride Limit
</Directory>
And the following directory structure:
var/
www/
.htaccess
uploads/
.htaccess
a/
.htaccess
b/
.htaccess
code/
.htaccess
c/
.htaccess
d/
.htaccess
What I did here, is create an .htaccess
in every sub-directory of the /var/www
directory.
It usually shouldn't be like so, but this is just for the sake of the example
Comparing the directory structure with the configuration, it means that all .htaccess
files inside in the /var/www
folder and its sub-directories, excluding the /var/www/uploads
directory and its sub-directories, can override all kinds of directives.
But /var/www/uploads
and its sub-directories can only use the .htaccess
file to override the Allow
, Deny
and Order
directives.
Note: As of apache 2.4 (Which is available by default in 13.10+) the Allow
, Deny
and Order
directives were replaced by a single directive named Require
.
etc/apache2/apache2.conf
, where I found my<Directory>
declarations.