Joomla 2.5 setup series

4. How to secure your Joomla installation’s PHP settings using FTP

This tutorial assumes you have a FTP application and have opened and logged in to your server via FTP

There are a number of both free and commercial FTP applications. In this example we will be using CuteFTP

1) On your remote web server, open the htdocs or public_html directory, then select the directory where Joomla has been previously installed

2) Double click the ‘joomla’ directory to open it

Scroll down to locate the ‘htaccess.txt’ file

3) Right click the ‘htaccess.txt’ file then select the Edit option(The ‘.htaccess’ file can be used by Joomla for a number of directives)

4) Select a place near the top of the file to enter the following code. Enter the code exactly as illustrated here

This will code will prevent any errors from being displayed to site visitors

This can help prevent hackers from running potentially harmful code

5) Now click the Save button

6) Now lets rename the file so Joomla can use it. Right click the ‘htaccess.txt’ file and select the Rename option

7) Now let’s rename the ‘htaccess.txt’ file to ‘.htaccess’

You now know how to secure your Joomla PHP settings using FTP