custom 404 display broken link

Anon

Hi, I'm trying to get my custom 404 message to be a bit more meaningful. I know how to get the HTTP_REFERRER for the page that had the broken link but I'd also like to display the actual URL that was trying to be accessed as many of my links are dynamically built. Any ideas?

TIA, Conrad.

Anon

I'm a little confused: You want your 404 page to display a nonexistent page?

$REDIRECT_URL contains the url of the requested-but-missing item.

If you want to build a pull-based caching system, grab basename($REDIRECT_URL), pull out any info that's required to do the db query (using one of the regex functions), build the page, store it in the requested location, then passthru() the results.

Anon

Thanks for your reply

I just want to display the URL of the page that doesn't exist, as it has been created dynamically. I realise I can debug to find this but want this URL to display on my 404 page so site users can email this info to the webmaster (me).

I tried echoing $REDIRECT_URL on the 404 page but it had no value.

cheers, Conrad.

Anon

Ah!

In your 404.php page,

<?
mail("youremail@yoursite.com","Not found: $REDIRECT_URL",
"Referred by $HTTP_REFERER
NOT FOUND $REDIRECT_URL
Visited by $REMOTE_HOST");
?>

... and be sure to put this into your Apache config file and restart:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

Anon

Thanks - I've tried the email which works, but the problem I still have is that there is no value for $REDIRECT_URL

cheers, Conrad.

Anon

Are you using something other than Apache as a Web server?

Anon

im using apache too and i'm experiencing the same problem...

apache is running on FreeBSD

conrad

With a bit more digging I have come up with this -
PHP gets it's environment variables from Apache.
The one we need is called REDIRECT_URL.
See:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/custom-error.html

The problem is that the REDIRECT* env vars are not available if you use ErrorDocument 404 http://...
ie it must be to a local file path

My problem is that I can only get ErrorDocument 404 to work with http://... and not with a local path. When I use a local path I get an "additional 404 error" ie it can't find the 404 page even though I've given the correct path.

That's the end of the line for me today...but thanks for inspiring me to delve more deeply.

Anon

yes, that's my problem too,

i also can only use http://www.bla.com/404msg.php and not with a full path....

yelvington

Are you running virtual hosts? If so, be sure that you put the ErrorDocument directive in the <VirtualHost *> section after you have defined the docroot for the virtual host, otherwise it may be looking in the wrong location in your filesystem. Also, the path should be relative to the docroot, not absolute.