Intro

• Drupal tries to provide a one size fits all htaccess for Apache webservers, but this goal is increasingly difficult (for example: #1269780: Use +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch instead of +FollowSymLinks option in .htaccess - Security
  ).
• A webmaster also needs to manually modify htaccess every time during a version upgrade to use Drupal with or without a prefix.

This project autogenerates a Drupal root htaccess file based on your settings.

You can

• Auto insert Boost htaccess settings
• Set site prefix to www or non www
• Use Followsymlinks or SymlinksIfOwnersMatch

Configure it at /admin/config/system/htaccess

When you hit save the htaccess is generated, and the existing htaccess is saved to .htaccess-backup!

This module can break your site, so at the moment only developers should test it and provide patches. If your site would break, you need to manually restore the htaccess backup file

Ideas

• drush integration, eg drush htaccess-create.
• currently htaccess is hardcoded in the module. Do string replace on existing htaccess instead.
• allow modules to hook into htaccess.
• hook_cron to check if htaccess altered and report in site status
• separate admin_settings_submit from htaccess generation, so that we have a separate button for "generate htaccess" instead of the save button
• manual htaccess text editor?
• get security team approval :) Drupal already generates some htaccess, so it's probably ok (some issues #72809: configuration variable to control automatic .htaccess creation
• More ideas at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-htaccess-control/

Development

If you have an issue or an idea please provide a patch as well, and I will make you comaintainer. Don't know how to program? Learn to do so, Don't want to learn? Pay someone to do the work.