I'm developing a new website with PHP & MySQL.
The website is for an online eBook library that grant access to its books based on paid subscription plans.
So, I need to make sure the PDF files of these books are well protected and can't be saved, downloaded, or in anyway copied.
How can I do that?
I suggest you to convert the PDF into an image , and display the first page or as you like, check this library it can be useful
Imagemagick
I think this is not a PHP or MYSQL solution. PDF's have a "protected mode". There you can disable printing the pdf. You should look for a server side pdf recreation tool that can recreate the pdf in protected mode and serve the user this file. Take a deeper look into PDF functions. I think i can remember that there should also a trial mode also and the ability to view only on 1 device.
Here a link for more info: http://www.dummies.com/software/adobe/acrobat/restrict-who-can-edit-or-print-pdf-documents/
You'll be able lock down the files from unwanted downloads. But redistribution or sharing login details will be a battle.
Some options I can think of
Option 1:
You can handle this yourself on the server. Housing the PDFs outside of the public Apache directory (so there is no way a URL can reach it). Then with a PHP function read the contents of the file and stream it to the browser.
Streaming a large file using PHP
Option 2:
Use something like AWS S3. You can lock down the bucket so there is no public access. And generate signed URLs as needed. They'll be unique urls which you can specify a time limit of availablity. AWS S3 The security of a signed URL as a hyperlink
Related
I am showing PDF, Video file preview in my web application, but i want to give only read access to users, no one can`t download PDF & video files, I want to prevent users, how can we prevent users to download it using PHP ? only they can view, please share you ideas as soon as.
Thanks
Any content that is shown on the client's side, technically speaking, already downloaded to the user's machine. If the user is seeing the PDF file - it's already been downloaded.
For video: it's not that straightforward, you can organize a streaming of the video. It'll be fairly more complex for the user to download it as one file, but still, can be captured.
Relatively new to web development here, but am trying to implement an image upload feature, the contents of which will be previewed to the person (administrator) uploading the image, and then stored in a database (and displayed to the end user on a different page).
I found a resource that uses a Imageshack API, and was a bit confused about what this is and how the person implemented the API to achieve the image upload. The code for this is here: http://www.sceditor.com/posts/how-to-upload-and-insert-an-image/
When I googled "Imageshack API," I kept running across something that said I need to request a key. What does this mean, and do I have to do it? Is this the easiest way to go about creating an image upload feature for my purposes?
Thank you all very much!
Imageshack API is for uploading image files to your account hosted at Imageshack.com. It seems that you want to upload image files to your own website and store such files on your own web servers (either in a cloud service such as AWS or your co-located/managed servers at some data centres). So, you probably do not want to use Imageshack.
As to how to upload image files using HTML & PHP, you may want to check out a short tutorial at:
www.w3schools.com/php/php_file_upload.asp
Also, by the way, storing image files into a database such as MySQL may not be a good idea -- image files should be stored as files. It is faster to access such image files on a web server than to access image contents stored in a database.
Doing some research on trying to secure documents on a server so that visitors cannot copy paste the content.
Users can upload documents as pdf, doc, docx, and currently they can download these files in staging enviroment. Anyone know of a way I could either upload these as read only so once they are downloaded they cannot be edited or copy pasted etc?
Or is there a way I could get the contents of these files and display the content on a webpage while disabling copy paste etc?
Just looking for some ideas on a solution for this.
You cannot control web browser behavior.
The only way to do that is to use a script to render a part of a document.
For example, rendering page by page in a web view. But user could copy/past content even if you deploy some Javascript.
Perhaps, you should take a look to Flash, Silverlight or Java applet.
I think there are few solutions that can limit access to read only.
But il will mainly limited to computers.
You can protect a file with a password too.
Files could be downloaded but only users owning the password could edit them.
This is the case for PDF files, Excel files, etc.
It's a way but I don't think it's the best way.
I think the easiest way is to convert your documents as PDF files and to limit actions to read only by adding a password. You ll be able to disable write permission, print permission, etc. And rendering a PDF on a web page is very simple.
Is there any possiblity to create a thumbnail of uploaded video file in php without using ffmpeg.
Most server side scripts rely on ffmpeg, so if you can't use that you can either upload the video to an external service but that would mean sending the whole file OR you could try creating them client-side in the browser -- Generate thumbnails from video files using HTML5's video tag and canvas
If however you can't use ffmpeg for installtion reasons you could look at a wrapper -- It currently provides FFmpeg-PHP emulation in pure PHP so you wouldn't need to compile and install the module.
In the past I have used this website to do video conversion and create thumbnails. It works very well and have both free and paid plans.
The system consists of several "robots" that do different jobs. These robots can read your videos if you put them in a public folder with an URI or Amazon S3 for example. The actions that the robot must do are defined in "templates" in JSON and have a PHP SDK. Have a look at the docs.
P.S: I'm not related with transloadit, seems like I am a commercial guy...
I would like to start a upload and download website for huge files (up to 1gb). I thought that it would be better to download the files using FTP (with PHP), because this protocol is especially used for these types of transfers.
The cliënt gets an email, including a download link to download the file (like yousendit.com). When they click on the link a download box appears. My problem is that I don't know how to show a download box using ftp and php. I have read that it isn't possible to immediately download a file by PHP, using FTP. Is this correct?
Do I have to create a temporary files on the server to let the client download the file? If yes, is this also a good solution for huge files?
What do you advice me to give the clients the possibility to download these huge files?
Thanks for your reply!
You can generate unique address based on session_id (create this folder on runtime and move huge file there) and redirect user to this link
For example, you have file huge.tgz
1. Send you client link http://***/user/john/file/huge.tgz
2. Ask user for auth in this page if they lost session
3. get session id
4. create on your server folder with name equals session id and move huge.tgz here
5. redirect user to unique ftp link ftp://***/17oe5kf8iYmpt66bjs89hcuo83/huge.tgz
You should disallow list files and directories on ftp server
Can't you send them an FTP link ? Why do you need PHP?
ftp://ftp12.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ls-lR.gz
You probably want to use PHP to handle everything but the file transfer. Once you have done all the checks you want you can redirect the browser to the file specifying the protocol as ftp. though you won't be able to have a progression bar in your site, the browser/ftp app will probably display one.