Image Display in PHP - php

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!

Related

Setting file permissions on a web server

Need a bit of clarification on this.
I have a folder in my web server that will contain sensitive information that no one should be able to read. My script currently does this:
makes the folder with 0777 permission and places an image in that folder
I have a second script that does this:
pulls that image from that specific folder, and shows it to the user
However, right now if the user knew the exact name of the parent folder, they can just type it in their browser and see all the images contained in that folder, like: www.testsite/test/images
What file permission can I use instead of 0777, that will allow these two scripst to write in and read in to the folder, WITHOUT allowing anyone to view the contents of the folder when typing it in their browser?
If I understand your problem correctly, you're worried about a user typing in /test/images/ into the URL bar, and seeing the directory listing containing your secret file.
Setting a chmod of 000 would mean that neither of your scripts (nor you) would be able to access the folder.
In my opinion, you'd be far better off using .htaccess with deny from all. This will make it so that you cannot 'open' any file in that folder, though you can still include them in PHP.
Alternatively, you may opt for creating an index.php in your /images/ folder, and setting an automatic redirect with header('Location: /'). This way a user wouldn't be able to see the directory listing.
Hope this helps! :)

upload security protection - do i need additional protection on a 777 folder

I just started working with uploading files via php.
From my understanding you need to set the properties of the folder to 777 so anyone can upload to that location.
That's fine and i only obviously keep information there that is not sensitive, its basically images which are displayed back to the public.
However can someone not just run a delete statement if they know the image name to my server folder or is that only possible if the php file is on my server?
i.e delete myimage.png
Basically my question is other than the normal security precautions like limiting the upload of only .png, using basename etc do i need to take additional security measures to prevent someone deleting files in that folder or can that only be done from a script on my webserver?
I wont be using any post methods to delete images or anything like that but i'm just not sure if its possible to take advantage of a folder with 777 permission and do unauthorized stuff since i gave full access to the folder.
By 777 you're actually giving the read/write/execute access to all the user of the machine where your server lives. Note that this does not mean even website visitors can read/write/execute directly. Its always your webserver (Apache) that does it.
However can someone not just run a delete statement if they know the image name to my server folder or is that only possible if the php file is on my server
If you're PHP scripts have holes then, yes. If your webserver has holes then, yes :)
do i need additional protection on a 777 folder
Yes, you can do with a more restrictive permission. Make the owner of the public upload folder to be apache (mostly www-data), set permissions of just 755, or may be 775 in case even the group wants to write to it.
you can change folder permission 777 to 755 or 744.

assign permission to the directly using root level access in php

I am developing an application which is having 2 servers. The first one is Web Server, where I save my PHP files and another one is File Server where I am storing all the files uploaded by the user.
I want to assign the write permission to directory at runtime so that I can upload the file and after uploading the file I need to change its permission to its previous state.
When I tried chomod(FILE_PATH, 0755). It shows me an error. Assign write permission as root. I have the administrator level credentials of File Server.
What I want is to "Grant permission 777 to the directory by logging in as root at runtime"
Kindly help if there is any code sample available. Thanks in Advance.
You do NOT want to have your server logging in as root. Let me say that again. You really do NOT want your webserver to be logged on as root. If you did that, anyone that got control of PHP could do anything at all on the server. It is seriously unadvisable.
What you want to do is change the owner of the folder to either be the webserver, or assign it into the same group so that the webserver can happily change your folder options and the like.
You can use sudo chown username somedir to change the owner. This article might also help clear up permissions for you.
Edit: Try this blog post for a fairly good broad-ranging article on linux permissions.

Allowing upload and browse but disallowing download

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.

Folder security?

I have a folder named upload which is filled with folders of users uploaded files.
Is there any way I can stop people from directly downloading my users files by simply typing the folder names and file name into the address bar?
Example: user Jim's folder is stored at HOST/uploads/jim
user Jim's important file "myimportantfile.txt" is stored at HOST/uploads/jim/myimportantfile.txt
Now, if just anyone types into the address bar: www.HOST.com/uploads/jim/myimportantfile.txt , they will be able to view Jim's important file.
How can I stop this from happening?
Can I write certain attributes when making the directories?
You don't want to have those files in a web-accessible folder. Move them out of the webroot.
Once you do this, you can have a file like download.php to which you pass a file ID and it can then validate it is in fact Jim asking for his files and only then fetch the file and output it to the browser as an attachment. This is the safest/best way for security.
I belive file permissions of a directory +w-r+x will alow directory writes but not reads. In geeky unix terms this is %chmod 733 dirname. The directory ownership would have to be set properly using chown and chgroup. This applies to a unix environment.
You could use an .htaccess file to require a username and password to be entered making each folder a protected folder.
But I think the best way to do it would be to move the uploads folder outside of the webroot so that it's not directly accessible, and then create a script (PHP, ASP, etc) that serves up the requested file after authenticating the user.
The simplest solution is to just add an index.htm file to the folder.
Any visitors will then see this page rather than the index of files.
The page can be blank, or even better, redirect to the domain home page with a redirect.
Sure, you can use basic file/directory permissions in Linux. You can also set the entire tree to be denied by apache.
What platform / webserver software are you running?
Okay, linux:
If the owner of the directory is 'joe', and the group is 'apache', then:
chmod 750 joe
This would give the directory 'joe' permissions which allow the owner (joe) full access, the group (apache) write access (and the ability to enter the directory), and nothing else.
Is this an FTP drop-box?
What are the ownerships/groups like now?

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