Quickstart.html not?

[mort]

When did quickstart.html stop working as index.html?
-mort

[habilis]

Yes, I’ve noticed this change in the site-setup mechanism too. The oldest quickstart.html I can find is from late May, so just in the last month or so.

To explain for others: For a long time, when you setup web hosting for a site, Dreamhost would put a quickstart.html file in the web directory. That page displays a "example.com is almost there!" message with directions on how to upload your site. Once you uploaded an index.html or index.php file, the message wouldn’t be displayed (but the quickstart.html file would remain, unless you deleted it).

I believe this was implemented with Apache’s DirectoryIndex directive by defining quickstart.html as the lowest priority index to display. Something like:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php ... quickstart.html

The new mechanism avoids the need to put the quickstart.html in every new web directory and instead uses a centralized version. Probably configured something like this:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php ... /dh-system/quickstart.html

Although this change won’t affect most sites, there are a few situations where it may cause trouble:

1. If your site relies on a customized quickstart.html as your index file, then the site breaks and displays the standard quick-start page.
2. If your site is setup as a index-less directory listing, the the site will suddenly start displaying the standard quick-start page.

In either case the solution/work-around is to explicitly define a custom list of index files with DirectoryIndex in an .htaccess file.

I do wish DH would inform us of this type of change (or better yet, scan all sites to find affected users) – they may think it is trivial/invisible, but several of my admin/development sites broke due to #2.