I'm looking to force a 403 access denied response for an xml file in a directory outside of the default Wordpress install.

The url I'm trying to force the 403 response on looks like this mydomain/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

I've tried modifying the default Wordpress htaccess file by adding a line to ignore the custom directory but it doesn't seem to work. When visiting the url I get a 404. I did create the directory and xml file and pushed them to our server.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(autodiscover)($|/) – [L]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

<Files ~ "\.(xml)$">
    deny from all
</Files>

Wondering if anyone has every run into this before and if they found a solution. My end goal would be to just force the 403 on the one file so my xml sitemaps don't get blocked as well.

Thanks in advance.

I'm looking to force a 403 access denied response for an xml file in a directory outside of the default Wordpress install.

The url I'm trying to force the 403 response on looks like this mydomain/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

I've tried modifying the default Wordpress htaccess file by adding a line to ignore the custom directory but it doesn't seem to work. When visiting the url I get a 404. I did create the directory and xml file and pushed them to our server.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(autodiscover)($|/) – [L]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

<Files ~ "\.(xml)$">
    deny from all
</Files>

Wondering if anyone has every run into this before and if they found a solution. My end goal would be to just force the 403 on the one file so my xml sitemaps don't get blocked as well.

Thanks in advance.

• htaccess
• xml

2 Answers 2

So to restate your question you want mydomain/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml to produce a 403, and your Wordpress installation is at mydomain/ ?

Then this should do it to match that specific file only:

RewriteRule ^autodiscover/autodiscover.xml - [R=403,NC,L] 

The fix that worked was adding an htaccess file to the directory with the line below

ErrorDocument 403 default