CODEWITHSUNDEEP
php.htaccesssecurity
Julien
Julien

Reputation: 159

Restrict access to directory for users

I'm coding a small website with login for members. Every member have a dedicated folder and I'd like to know how to deny all access to this folder from everyone except form the user when he's logged in.

For now, I've set up things like that:

1) Every folder have an .htaccess with deny from all

2) When a user logged in, I use PHP to identify the user and get his folder. I get the user's IP address and I edit the .htaccess with

order deny,allow deny from all allow from 178.197.XXX.XXX

3) Once the user logged out, I reset the .htaccess to deny from all again

Is there a better way? And is there security risks?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1301

Answers (1)

Alex Howansky
Alex Howansky

Reputation: 53646

Don't use IP. One user is not equal to one IP.

Store the folders outside the document root of your web server. This way, the files can never be served directly by the web server itself.

I.e., do not serve the files directly like http://my.site.com/path/to/actual/file. Instead require that the file be requested through a proxy PHP script like http://my.site.com/getfile.php?file=name. The script would check that a user is logged in, check that a file named name exists in that user's directory, and then spew it with readfile() or similar.

Also, in general, your files should never be writable by the user that the web server process runs as -- especially your .htaccess files.

Upvotes: 1

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