robots.txt Rerouting on Development Servers

By  on  

Every website should have a robots.txt file.  Some bots hit sites so often that they slow down performance, other bots simply aren't desirable.  robots.txt files can also be used to communicate sitemap location and limit request rate.  It's important that the correct robots.txt file is served on development servers though, and that file is usually much different than your production robots.txt file.  Here's a quick .htaccess snippet you can use to make that happen:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} devdomain
RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots-go-away.txt [L]

The robots-go-away.txt file most likely directs robots not to index anything, unless you want your dev server to be indexed for some reason (hint:  you really don't want this).

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools LinkAlert

    One of my favorite Firefox plugins is called LinkAlert. LinkAlert shows the user an icon when they hover over a special link, like a link to a Microsoft Word DOC or a PDF file. I love that warning because I hate the surprise...

  • By
    CSS Triangles

    I was recently redesigning my website and wanted to create tooltips.  Making that was easy but I also wanted my tooltips to feature the a triangular pointer.  I'm a disaster when it comes to images and the prospect of needing to make an image for...

Discussion

  1. Here’s an example showing how to include multiple development domains:

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^localhost [OR]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.dev [OR]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^test.example.com [OR]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^staging.example.com
    RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots-disallow.txt [L]
    
  2. Steve

    use vagrant

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!