Question

I am curious how I could make a PHP script where you pass your username and password to my webserver and it downloads a file (or multiple) that is specific to that one user only. I am not sure where to start. Could someone please help? thanks!

Answer 1

Here it is:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.readfile.php

You shouldn’t put a password directly in the URL. Instead, use a random generated token, for example using MD5 ($token = md5($username.time());). So, your user table should look like this :

id
email
password
token

The URLs you’ll provide to your user will be like this :

http://www.example.com/download.php?token=$userToken&file=$file

And download.php:

<?php
if ( ! isset($_GET['token']) || ! isset($_GET['file'])) {
    //throw 404
}
//check token exists in DB else throw 403
//use readfile function :)