It seems I can't simply override Laravel's routing when trying to password protect a subfolder in views with htaccess. I put it and an .htpasswd file together in the folder that I wanted to create authentication for but with no effect.
The reason for this is I want to have "client's eyes only" folders for work in progress projects, e.g. "example.com/clients/my-client/". These folders will only contain static content.
I tried adding a folder tree in public but that doesn't seem to work either (I guess public content needs to be declared to avoid being routed?). I'd rather stick with having these client pages as views.
Ideas?
Running Laravel 4.2 on Apache.
Because of the way Laravel does routing, all URIs are actually virtual URIs, so you can't put .htaccess files within any directories, as they're not really there.
However, you can use Laravel's Auth system to protect your routes (either using basic auth or a more traditional login form system).
If you don't want to have to hook Laravel up to a database just to protect some directories there are a couple of solutions:
You can write your own Auth provider that will just lookup the details in a file or config array key. It's not super-difficult to do this, though it may seem a little over the top just for the purposes you have.
You could use the SQLite database driver, which stores the database in an easily-accessible file (in app/database/) so the database is at least kept alongside your code.
Related
I have recently launched a website on GoDaddy hosting. I have keept some images and JavaScript files used in website, in separate folders. I want to prevent the users from browsing those images and files by simply appending the folder and file name in the website URL. For example
www.example.com/images/logo.png
If I understand correctly, you want to have html file with images, that shouldn't be accessible alone? If yes, then it cannot be done. You can watch for correct HTTP Referrer header, but it can be simply faked and it also makes it inaccessible for browsers that don't send referrer or having sending it forbidden for "privacy" reasons.
If you want hide files to be accessible only by server side scripts, ftp/scp, then you can try to use .htaccess (if GoDaddy runs on Apache) and correct configuration: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/access.html
Another way could be hiding that files and creating one-shot token like this:
<img src=<?pseudocode GEN_TOKEN("file.jpg") ?> /> with another file serving these hidden files just for generated token, then deleting it from DB. Nevertheless, this will not protect anybody from downloading or accessing these files, if they want...
But, anyway, try to clarify your question better...
If you are keeping images/files in folder which is open to public, I guess you kept in that folder for purpose, you want public to access those images and files.
How public know images file name? Stop file content listing for your web site.
I am not aware which language you are using on web server, but in ASP.NET you may write module/ middle ware which can intercept in coming request and based on your logic (e.g. authentication and authorization) you can restrict access. All modern languages support this kind of functionality.
I have multiple dynamic directories that I want to prevent the user from accessing, but I'd like the server to load those files.
My structure is as follows but does grow dynamically so I can't statistically name the files:
views/mods/headers/john/
views/mods/headers/john/meta/screenshot.png
views/mods/headers/john/index.html
views/mods/headers/john/style.css
How do I provide access to the folder john for the server and not a user trying to view it directly?, as well as screenshot.png, index.html and style.css?
Fairly new to Node so I'm not that sure, but in .htaccess it would be something like this: (htaccess) How to prevent a file from DIRECT URL ACCESS?
Thanks.
Using website grabbers whole website with folder structure can be downloaded.
Is there any way to prevent this?
If so,how?
The only way to protect a websites markup is not to publish it. If you want your users to see something they need to get the HTML markup and the images, that should be displayed. And therefore the files need to be accessible. And if your files are accessible every user/bot/crawler/grabber can save these files.
The best way is to put a few files like the index page in the main directory and call the other sub pages in it. If using php then you may do the following.
Say keep the index.php in the main folder and keep the homepage.php in a directory called includes and use the homepage in the index.php via include function in php.
Now add a .htaccess file to the includes folder which must contain
"deny from all"
This way users can use the page but will not have direct access to the files. So will be for the grabber.
Let's say there's a website www.example.com/user/john. Accessing that link takes you to www.example.com/user/john/index.html.
There are files like www.example.com/user/john/picture.png and www.example.com/user/john/document.html. These are also accessible to the public, but there's no link to these from index.html.
Is there a systematic way to find out these files? I'm asking because I'm going to set up my website, and I also want to put up a few files that I don't necessarily want every one to see, only people who I give the link to. So I'm wondering how easy/hard it is to find out that those files exist in my directory.
Most importantly you have to switch off the possibility to just browse the directory with the browser. Every server has its own way to switch this off. Then you can use the proposed way of "security through obscurity".
Another way can be, to have a specific folder whos access is restricted by a http basic authentication. This can be configured in the .htaccess file which you put in the root folder of your directory you want to share only with specific people.
Just google ".htacces" and "basic authentication".
HTTP does not provide a directory listing method as such. Most web servers can be set up to provide a HTML-formatted directory listing if an index file such as index.html does not exist. If you provide an index file so that autoindexing does not happen (or if you disable autoindex by web server configuration), and if your "hidden" file names are hard to guess, they should be pretty hard to find. I sometimes publish such files in a directory with a random gibberish name.
"Share links" used by Dropbox, Picasa and other services do the same, they just use longer random file/directory names or random parameters in the URL.
To provide real security you'll want to set up https (SSL/TLS) so that any eavesdroppers on the network cannot easily look at the requested URLs, and authentication such as HTTP Basic Authentication with username/password. For less sensitive stuff, http to a random hidden directory will often do fine.
I am stuck at the situation where I want the url, which contains a folder having some files (html, swf etc.), to be accessible after I validate the user.
For example.
The url to access is:
A - http://mysite.com/files/version/1/file.swf
And this above url is accessible from the link,
B - http://mysite.com/view/1
I have implemented a way to hide the URL A from a normal user but if the user somehow is a semi-techie person then he can know the swf file location from firebug or other tools. So, to make the access-to-file secure what should I do?
If a user somehow knows the first url(A) and then enters it in browser, i have to check if the user is logged-in and if validation is done it lets the url A to be loaded.
Since, in CI, the controller names cannot be named same as the folders in the root directory, in this case i cannot have a controller called “files”. So, the only option left to make this secure access to url work is to use htaccess rule/cond. If this is the only option, then how can it be achieved by htaccess and if not, then what other options do i have.
Will the codeigniter's URI Routes work because when i tried like this:
$route[‘files/version/1/(:any)’] = “view/$1”;
and it doesnt work, maybe because there is no controller/function/param as files/versions/1 ...
looking for quick help. Thanks
There isn't a sure-fire way to do it without, for example, using .htpasswd.
One thing you could implement is sort of "Security by Obscurity". In that case you could redirect all requests to a file to the URL http://mysite.com/view/file-id and then instead of loading the requested file directly, you would load a .php template with the appropriate headers - be it an image, a flash file or anything else.
But it really depends on how the files are going to be managed, since every file will need an entry in the database and you would have to output different headers for different types of files. And if someone still manages to guess the path to the file, it will be directly accessible.