I think this question should be something easy but after searching all over the web I couldnt find an answer, so I decided to ask here.
I have a file uploader in my website that works with php. The folder where files are being uploaded has 777 chmod. I also have a php script to list the files in that folder. What I need is to allow php to upload and browse files on that folder, but dont allow people to do it. The only solution I imagined is to chown that folder to another user different than default, so I could later chmod in filezilla and allow only owner to do it, so people will see the files trough the output of the php script, but not if they navigate to that folder.
Im using Debian, apache2. Id like to know what could I do.
To make it shor, my aim: allow php to upload, read, write and execute files in that folder, but not clients unless they use my php script.
Thanks in advance
Put all the files you're talking about in their own directory. Add a .htaccess file to that directory. The contents of the .htaccess should be deny from all.
This will prevent any user from manually accessing the files as access will be blocked off. Your PHP script can still browse the contents of the file and serve it up as an attachment with the correct content type.
For more info on how to serve a file for download in PHP, read this: https://serverfault.com/questions/316814/php-serve-a-file-for-download-without-providing-the-direct-link
All services including web servers run in a security context which is an account in the OS, for example apache starts using apache user in apache group. It is enough to change mode and change owner to this user and group. Never chmod a directory to 777 until there is a good explanation for that. Using this trick, web service process only can read, write and execute in that directory.
As well, if you want the browser clients not to see(read) the contents of that directory, you should deny listing on that directory. I think it is disabled for default.
Related
I have a script that uploads a *.csv to import into a DB table that I have which works great in linux through chmod($target, 0777); but I can't for the life of me find the solution to do exactly this but on a Windows based Apache server.
Some other posts have people responding "don't put in the 0777 and it should work" but that's not the case for me. Thanks!
Thanks to the comment left on my original post I was able to figure it out with a little more help from https://web.archive.org/web/20171121192635/http://www.howyoudo.info/index.php/how-to-fix-windows-server-upload-file-inherit-permissions-error/
The problem only happens when you use PHP to upload a file. When you upload a file, PHP sends the file to a temporary directory on the
hard drive (for me it is C:\Windows\Temp) and then copies it over to
it’s intended directory. Once the file has landed in the temporary
directory, it is assigned the permissions of that directory. The
problem is when Windows copies that file, it keeps the temporary
directory’s permissions and doesn’t inherit your web directory’s
permissions.
The easiest way to fix this problem is to add to the temporary directory your intended web directory’s permissions. There’s no need
to erase the permissions already in the temporary directory, just add
the web directory’s permissions to them. In other words, follow these
steps
To change the permissions of your temporary upload directory, find
the “upload_tmp_dir” in your php.ini file.
Set it to the directory
of your choosing (outside your web folders of course) or leave it at
default (for me it is C:\Windows\Temp).
Browse to this folder and add the permissions of your web folders to it.
While Brian Leishman's answer will work, if you do not have the ability to edit permissions on the temp folder, you can make your uploaded file inherit permissions from its new location manually with the following on the command line:
icacls "target.txt" /q /c /reset
So, using PHP's exec() function:
exec( 'icacls "target.txt" /q /c /reset' );
For details of the various icacls flags, see: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753525.aspx
Tip: Using the /t flag, you can use pattern matching to process multiple files.
So I created a couple of directories and files with FTP, thus the owner is the username I use to login to the server. Now I'd like to allow users of the website to upload images to those directories. Unfortunately for the website to store images, it should be owned by Apache. How can I fix this? I've been reading around on this but can't directly find an answer.
I don't have SSH, so I guess all command-line-things are not applicable for me.
Edit
I tried to then make the folders again using apache, but now ofcourse I can't write any files using ftp into those directories.
Provided that at least the one directory is writeable by the apache user (lets call this directory 'writeabledir', it may be your root dir '/'), you must delete the folders you created via ftp and create a php script to create the directories you need.
If for example you want a directory called users and inside it another directory called upload
Create file makedirs.php on your server.
<?php
$oldumask = umask(0);
mkdir("writeabledir/users/upload",0777,true); // or even 01777 so you get the sticky bit set
umask($oldumask);
?>
Now run your makedirs.php once, by calling your.serv.er/makedirs.php on your browser
EDIT:
If you don't want to delete and recreate your directories,you could always try to change file permissions from ftp.
For exampe with FileZilla, just right click on the desired folder and set permissions to 777. If your ftp user does not have permission to do this, then there is no other way, except from asking an administrator to do this for you.
EDIT2:
Added umask to ensure that folders created by apache are writeable by everyone. (taken from http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.mkdir.php#1207 )
Friend looks I work in php, some versions change the way of solution, however the most common is already that you want to store it would be necessary to create a database and import it to esu code that also serves to some images you want to come place, plus the wisest thing to do and you create a database with the fields necessary for its realization, import, put in a file directory of your schedule, you also advise using aptana Studio 3 greatly facilitates the creation of codes among many things and low xampp it already comes with apache integrated in one place will help you a lot any questions on installation just look at youtube he will describe
Is it possible to arrange file permissions/group ownership/etc in such a way that a file can be read by the function readFile() for a forced download, but it cannot be downloaded by navigating to the literal url of the file?
Maybe you could add the user that is running apache / php to the group that owns the file. And set config to read and write for owner and owner group, and no permission at all for others. (-rwxrw---- 0r 0760)
Never tested it, but it should work.
The Apache user will need read permissions. To prevent it from being navigated to, the best (and easiest) solution is to store the file outside of the web folder.
I want to display image through PHP.
When I put image in /var/www/ directory then it is working fine, I am giving full path.
But when I put image in some other directory (say home) then it is not displaying.
Usually, servers have some kind of sandbox which prevent your code to access files outside of it for security reasons.
I encourage you to put all data you want your server to be able to access inside its folders (/var/www directory or subdirectories of it)
First off, you should really check your error logs as they will probably point you in the right direction.
Without more information, I'd have an educated guess that the Apache user does not have rights to the file and/or the containing directories.
You can change permissions using the chown and chmod commands in a shell.
EDIT: But don't allow access to any dir with sensitive data (e.g. your home directory) to the webserver!
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.