<p>I'm using <code>.htaccess</code> and <code>mod_rewrite</code> to point to files that reside behind the DocumentRoot. My folder structure looks like this:</p>

<pre><code>home/
    webroot/
    other_files/
</code></pre>

<p>I have a <code>.htaccess</code> file in webroot with the following content:</p>

<pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /home/other_files/$1
</pre>

<p>If I try to access <a href="http://example.com/file.html" rel="noreferrer">http://example.com/file.html</a> I receive the following error:  </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>The requested URL /home/other_files/file.html was not found on this server.  </p>
</blockquote>

<p>Is it even possible to load files that are behind the DocumentRoot? If so, can someone point me in the right direction?</p>

I believe you need to add a section with
```
```
<Directory "/home/other_files">
  (options)
</Directory>
```
```
to your server configuration before apache will be able to serve anything from it.  For an example, my DocumentRoot is /var/www but there is this section in the default available site:
```
```
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>
```
```
You could then rewrite a URL to go to /doc/ and the server would know where to get the files from.