This might seem like a duplicate question but I have tried the solution given in the similar questions.
I want to limit access to files in a few folders on my apache server so that they can only be served through a php script to only the users logged in to the part of my system that should have access to any particular folder.
Other solutions suggest using the .htaccess
deny from all
allow from 127.0.0.1
But that seems to deny the files from everywhere.Including the local php scripts.
Im considering .htpasswd but that is an extra level of user credentials that needs to be handeled and I'd prefere to avoid that.
How should I get around this? Is there any better way of storing the files?
htaccess cannot deny access to files via php using include/require functions. If your php include is not accessing the file then the problem is the path to the file.
Somehow php was restricted by the
deny from all
allow from 127.0.0.1
to include and require files in the affected folders. This goes against what I can read from the apache documentation how this should work and I have no real answer why. The problem persisted both on my localhost using Xampp and on the webhotel one.com.
My original question was badly formed since I used require to test if I had read access to the folder when I actually wanted to use readfile.
My main concern was that I wanted to serve files for download from an inaccessible directory.
And the
readfile($filename);
could still access the files.
The soultion to this problem was that I realized that readfile() and include() somhow gets different permissions. I could not find this in any documentation.
Sorry if this is a trivial question.
I am a kind of new to PHP and I'm creating a project from scratch. I need to store my application logs (generated using log4php) as files, and I don't want them to be public.
They are now stored in a subfolder under my PHP application folder, (/myAppFolder/logs) so they are served by Apache.
Where shall I store them, or what shall I do to keep them away from being served as content by Apache?
You can either have them in a directory above the root, or, if you're on shared host/ can't have the files above the root for whatever reason, you can have them in a directory that denies all HTTP access.
So you could have a folder called "secret_files" with a .htaccess file sitting inside:
.htaccess:
deny from all
Which will prevent HTTP access to files/subfolders in that folder.
Somewhere not under the public root!?
This is more a server config question as it depends on your server, but in apache you could use the custom log directives to set the location, so if you have
/www/myapp
Create
/www/log
and put them there instead. You need control over the config to do this so look up your web hosts docs to find out how.
I'm building a website based on php and i want to ask where to put files that are retrieved with a require statement, so that they can not be accessed from users with their browser.
(for example a php file that connects to my database)
EDIT actually i think the better way is to put them outside the public root because apache tutorial says htaccess will have a slowdown impact. it can be done with adding a ../
for example require("../myFile.php"); (At least this works in my server)
Best regards to all
That depends on the web server configuration. Usually (or at least in all cases I witnessed), you have a document root which cannot be accessed by users with their browser, with in there a folder containing all public material (often called htdocs, httpdocs, public_html or anything of the kind. Often, you can place your PHP include files in that root, and then require them using require("../include_file.php");
However, it depends on the configuration whether PHP can include files outside your public folder. If not, a .htaccess file is your best option.
If you place those files outside the document root of your webserver users cannot access these files with a browser.
If you use apache you can also place these files in a directory to which you do not allow access with a .htaccess file.
And as a last remark, if your files do not generate output, there is no way users can check the contents of the files.
If you mean source code then it is not visible for users, if you want hide folder contents use .htaccess directive Options -Indexes to hide files, if you can access php source your server configuration is wrong and it is not parsing php files.
You normally place them into a directory that is not accessible over the webserver (outside the document or web root). Sometimes called a "private" directory.
You then include/require the file from that path as PHP has still access to the files.
See also:
placing php script outside website root
disable access to included files - For a method if you're not able to place the files in a private directory.
Just make them secure with .htacces!
Here's a very clear tutorial for protecting files with a password. If you don't need direct access to the files per browser, or only your scripts need access, just block them completly by changing the code between
<Files xy>
change this bit here
</Files>
to
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
Then you won't need your htpassword file anymore either!
You need to put these files outside of public-facing folders on your web server. Most (all?) web hosts should have the capability to change the document root of the website.
For example, let's say that all of your files are served from the following directory on your host: /home/username/www/example.com/
This means that anything that resides inside that directory is visible to the internet. If you went to http://example.com/myfile.png it would serve the file at /home/username/www/example.com/myfile.png.
What you want to do is create a new directory called, for example, public which will serve your files, and point the document root there. After you've done that, the request for http://example.com/myfile.png will be served from /home/username/www/example.com/public/myfile.png (note the public directory here). Now, anything else that resides within the example.com directory won't be visible on your website. You can create a new directory called, for example, private where your sensitive include files will be stored.
So say you have two files: index.php, which serves your website, and sensitive.php which contains passwords and things of that nature. You would set those up like this:
/home/username/www/example.com/public/index.php
/home/username/www/example.com/private/sensitive.php
The index.php file is visible to the internet, but sensitive.php is not. To include sensitive.php, you just include the full file path:
require_once("/home/username/www/example/com/private/sensitive.php");
You can also set your application root (the root of your websites files, though not the root of the publicly accessible files) as a define, possibly in a config file somewhere, and use that, e.g.:
require_once(APP_ROOT . "sensitive.php");
If you can't change the document root, then what some frameworks do is use a define to note that the file shouldn't be executed directly. You create a define in any file you want as an entry point to your application, usually just index.php, like so:
if (!defined('SENSITIVE')) {
define('SENSITIVE', 'SENSITIVE');
}
Then, in any sensitive file, you check that it's been set, and exit if it hasn't, since that means the file is being executed directly, and not by your application:
if (!defined('SENSITIVE')) {
die("This file cannot be accessed directly.");
}
Also, make sure that your include files, when publicly accessible (and really, even if not), have a proper extension, such as .php, so that the web server knows to execute them as PHP files, rather than serving them as plain text. Some people use .inc to denote include files, but if the server doesn't recognize them as being handled by PHP, your code will be publicly visible to anyone who cares to look. That's not good! To prevent this, always name your files with a .php extension. If you want to use the .inc style to show your include files, consider using .inc.php instead.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated:
I have a website running with php on IIS6 IIS7. I am protecting all the .php files by starting a session. The .php pages can only be accessed if the session is started by logging in through the login.php page
All my .php files are in the following directory (using as example):
home/dir
Is it possible to use php and .htaccess to protect all files in the following directory:
home/dir/files
The files in this directory are word files, pdf's and other files types.
Once the user has logged in through login.php I don't want them to have to retype their username and password when trying to access home/dir/files
I hope that I made sense. Thank you.
In general, a good way to do this is to have the static files outside your website directory structure but still somewhere that the web server has permissions to access them. Then, since you're using PHP anyway, when a user requests a document, they would really be requesting a PHP page that checks the user's permissions then, if the user has adequate permissions, serves the file.
.htaccess are generally associated with Apache, not IIS, but see Is there a file-based equivalent to .htaccess in IIS6?
That said, perhaps you could put your files directory out of harms way and put it somewhere outside the document root. Then you can control download of each file through a PHP script which checks the authentication details.
I have a script that allows only authorised users to upload files to a certain folder.
However I do not know how to prevent people from downloading freely without login.
I need the solution in php.
I have googled around but nothing straight forward as yet.
Currently in my document root I have a folder called admin and a subfolder called uploads inside the admin. So only admin role can upload. Both editor and admin can download. What should I do in this case?
Please advise.
Put the files somewhere outside the public webroot directory, or configure your server to not serve the files. As long as your server will happily serve everything with a valid URL, there's nothing you can do with PHP to prevent that.
If your files are in the /public_html/ folder, take them out of that folder and place them in e.g. /secret_files/, so your directory structure looks something like this:
public_html/
index.html
admin/
admin_index.php
secret_files/
my_secret_file.txt
The webserver is only configured to serve files in the /public_html/ directory, so nobody will have access to directories outside (technical term above) it.
To still enable somebody to download those files, do as cletus suggests and use readfile to "manually serve" the files via a PHP script. PHP will still have access to these other parts of the file system, so you can use it as a gatekeeper.
Don't store the files in a directory under the document root.
Instead move them somewhere else and then a PHP script can programmatically determine if someone can download them and then use readfile() or something similar to stream them to the user.
You could also configure the Web server to not serve files from this directory but then you need PHP to serve them anyway. It's cleaner simply not to put them under the document root.
Answering question on how to password protect with PHP:
This should solve your problem.