Question

Dear StackOverflowers,

I’m looking for a way to disable access to all folders of a specific name, I dynamically make folders with my web app, but some of those folders musn’t be accessed by others.

say my app makes folders:
Images
Videos
Scripts

and I want to make all the created folders Scripts be inaccessible? How would I go and make this happen? I’m not that familiar with htaccess, I know its possible to put a htaccess file in every directory, but I want to limit the disk read/writes to make sure the app is fast enough, is there a generic way to do this with 1 htaccess file?

A million thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Using Apache’s <DirectoryMatch> directive, you can easily set this up at the server level or VirtualHost level. However, you need access to the core configuration files to do so.

<DirectoryMatch "(Images|Videos|Scripts)" >
  Order deny,allow
  Deny from all
</DirectoryMatch>

To accomplish the same in a .htaccess file, you’ll probably need to make a RewriteRule at the top level.

RewriteEngine On
# Match directory names and forbid access with the F flag
RewriteRule  .*(Images|Videos|Scripts) - [F]

The above should match requests like:

http://example.com/stuff/Images/otherstuff
http://example.com/Images1234
http://example.com/dir/dir/dir/Videos/123.mpg