This was a new one for me. I was installing Magento today on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04.3 LTS to be exact) and ran into a problem where accessing the base Magento install URL would prompt to download the index.php file. The odd thing was that I could access the index.php directly and it would work just fine. This was running under Apache 2.2. It turns out that Apache needed my DirectoryIndex to be specified, which is strange because this hasn’t been a problem with other installations. At any rate, I updated my default config file located in /etc/apache2/sites-available with the following lines just before the closing VirtualHost tag:

<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
</IfModule>

I then restarted apache (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart) and was good to go.

If you’re working with Magento Commerce you’ll most likely want to remove index.php from the URL when you go live. Or maybe you don’t care so feel free to stop reading.

This post addresses all the things you can do to remove index.php, but let me touch on the items that worked for me:

- From Magento’s admin go to System > Configuration > Web and change “Use Web Server Rewrites” to Yes

- Make sure both Base URLs for secure and unsecure don’t contain index.php

- Make sure Apache rewrites are enabled: sudo a2enmod rewrite

- This is the big one…I had to change my Apache config (/etc/apache2/sites-available/default) where it references AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All

- Restart Apache and you should be good to go

I hope this helps!