I have a site with Apache 2.2.22 . I have enabled the mod-expires and mod-headers modules seemingly correctly: $ apachectl -t -D DUMP_MODULES … expires_module (shared) headers_module (shared) … Settings include: ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 minutes" ExpiresByType application/xml "access plus 1 minute" Checking the headers of requests, I see that max-age is set correctly both for the generic case and for xml files (which are auto-generated, but mostly static). I would like to have different expiries for xml files in a directory (e.g. /data), so http://site/data/sample.xml expires 24 hours later. I enter the following in data/.htaccess: ExpiresByType application/xml "access plus 24 hours" Header set Cache-control "max-age=86400, public" but it seems that apache ignores this. How can I ensure apache2 uses the .htaccess directives? I can provide further information if requested.