I want to secure and hide my asset folder from publicity. I hear that can be done with the .htaccess file and change the name from my directory-name to random name of the directory and in that case, users can't know the real name of my directory placed into my public_html. Can someone help me with examples of all kinds of documentation? I didn't try anything because I have really bad knowledge of .htaccess coding. Any help will be thankful.
Well, you can do this, but I'm curious as to the purpose if it's just to casually "hide" the underlying file directory? This doesn't really offer any additional "security" and can also cause issues if you have a front-end proxy that is intended to serve static content. It can also be problematic if you are using a CMS like WordPress as you may need to modify the default behaviour. (Although there may be other developmental issues for which you would choose to do this.)
Ideally, you would do something like this with the Alias directive in the main server config (or vHost container).
In .htaccess you can internally rewrite the request using mod_rewrite. Lets's say you are referencing /assets in the URL, but the actual filesystem directory that this should map to is /secret then you could do the following to simply forward all requests to /secret:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^assets/(.+) secret/$1 [L]
Only requests for /assets/<something> will be forwarded. A request for /assets or /assets/ will simply result in a 404 (assuming this directory does not actually exist).
To be more selective and only forward requests for specific file types, based on the file extension, then you could do something like the following:
RewriteRule ^assets/(.+\.(?:jpg|webp|gif|css|js))$ secret/$1 [L]
You could also check to see whether the target file actually exists before rewriting, but this is generally unnecessary and best avoided since filesystem checks are relatively expensive.
Related
I wonder is it possible to learn the url structure which is written with mode_rewrite. For example, the url that I have is http://somesite.com/topic-header and there must be a kind of somesite.com?id=123 or somesite.com?title=topic-header. Is there any way to detect that?
Only if you have access to the folder in which the .htaccess file resides (or in the apache configuration files, albeit less used).
It's also common knowledge to redirect any links that are not found on the filesystem to index.php, wordpress does this for example.
Good day. Got a problem here. I'm trying to forbid a folder and i succeeded from it,the problem for now is, I can't use it anymore.My web design does not work when I included it. How can i fix this?
I have tried to use options -indexes but it would not block the access if someone knows the file name like folder/css/index.css.
How can I block a user from accesing it without affecting my web-design.
By blocking access to the folder, you stopped the browser from being able to access it, which it needs to do in order to display it.
You won't ever be able to totally stop users from directly accessing the css file, if they're determined enough. The browser has to download the css file (so too can the users).
There are steps you can take to make it harder though. You could obfuscate/minify the CSS code to make it harder for people to understand - http://www.cssobfuscator.com
You could also check to make sure the referrer header is your website to prevent hotlinking - see http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/
Ultimately though, it will always be accessible and visible to your users
You can forbid access to the folder using the following in your /.htaccess
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !your_ip_address_here
RewriteRule ^folder/css/index\.css - [F,L,NC]
That means only your IP address will be able to access the protected folder.
I expose here my issue, I hope to explain myself clearly and correctly. In case of any specification, please ask me.
What I need is to redirect all the request (except the one to index.php) to another .php file, without the necessity to specify an argument.
here an example of what I need to do:
http://www.example.com -> shows index.php
but:
http://www.example.com/songs/title-of-the-song
should call the page: songs.php?dir=title-of-the-song of course without showin to the user the string "songs.php?dir=title-of-the-song" but just the URL
http://www.example.com/songs/title-of-the-song
It's what occurs with Drupal, but i'm not using that CMS for my site.
You are probably looking for something like that:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/songs/(.+)$ /songs.php?dir=$1 [L]
Note: this is the version for the http host configuration. For usage in .htaccess style files you have to adapt it slightly. But if you have access to the host configuration you should always prefer that over .htaccess style files. Those files require an additional module, are notoriously error prone, hard to troubleshoot and really slow the server down.
I have my .htaccess file, and I have a folder with config files in there, and they contain sensitive content, e.g. database details etc. What I would like to know is, how can I block access from a browser, but allow them to be accessed via my scripts?
I know that this can be achieved inside the PHP files themselves, but I'd rather use the .htaccess approach where possible.
Is this actually able to be done? I've attempted it before, but in the process of denying access to the file from the browser, it also denied access from the coding.
I have looked into this before, and some of the answers I came across suggested changing the extension to something like .inc, and then denying access to that. However, a couple of issues I have with that is that a) It instantly alerts anyone that can see that filename, for whatever reason, that it is a config file. Also, b) If my denial code breaks, browsers will not parse it as a PHP file, but rather an inc file, meaning it will print the code in the browser.
Basically, can this be done within a .htaccess file, or do I need to put something in the header of every config file?
Put these files outside of your web server's document root.
You can still access them via your server-side scripts, but this ensures no direct access to them from the outside world.
The conventional advice is to place such files "outside of your web server's document root". This is all well and good, but many shared hosting offerings only give write access to your public_html directory.
I use a simple convention: any private content (that is not URI addressable) is prefixed by an underscore or in a directory that's name is prefixed with an underscore (eg. _private or _include). I then include this rewrite rule in my DOCROOT .htaccess file:
# if a forbidden directory or file name (starting with a . or /)
# then raise 404 Fatal return
RewriteRule (^|/)[_.] - [F]
Remember that you'll need to prefix with a RewriteEngine On and/or include this at the top of any .htaccess file with the engine enabled.
Note that the "." prefix picks up files such as .htaccess.
Please use a framework, these kind of issues just doesn't need to exist. If you insist though, write a .htaccess to redirect every request to a single index.php in the root directory, which then have more logic to determine whether or not the request is for a valid file and include them, otherwise generate 404 or 403. If you need performance for static files, then use RewriteCond to exclude specific directories or file type from the index.php check.
What are the different approaches to securing a directory?
including an index page so contents can't be viewed
the problem with this is that people can still access the files if they know the filename they're after
including an htaccess file to deny all
this seems to be the best approach, but is there any case that an htaccess file can be passed by? are there any cases as well where htaccess is not available?
restricting folder access
this is also a nice solution, but the problem is, the folder I'm trying to secure should be viewable and writable by the program.
Are there any other ways that folder security can be done?
Best practice for Apache is to use htaccess to restrict - this only restricts from the webserver - but that should be what you need. You can add authentication into this - but for most needs to you can just deny all acess - which hides the directory completely.
Another method that can also work well with using htaccess to deny direct access would be to use htaccess in your route directory to rewrite urls. This means that a request such as /example/listItems/username/ted can be rewritten as a call to a php or other file such as:
/application/index.php?module=listItems&username=ted
The advantage of doing this is that the webserver does not give out paths to any directories so it is much more difficult for people to hack around looking for directories.
If you want to protect a directory of images you could also use htaccess to redirect to a different directory so that /images/image5.png is actually a call to :
/application/images/image5.png
You could also try not placing your protected directory under your www dir but on other "non www visible" location. If your app needs to read / write data, tell it to do it on the other location. Modify its properties so only the app has the proper rights to do so.