Question

I have a download folder.

So is it possible to redirect a user to a login page when he/she tries to download any of the files from the download folder.

I have heard this can be achieved using .htaccess, but I can’t find a good tutorial.

Answer 1

htaccess will be activated before the PHP engine. Hence you can’t use this system when you need to check if a user is logged in or not.
The way to do this is to send only logged in users to a page containing a file list for download, and when pressing the link PHP will do the actual downloading of the file to the client, using the right headers.

Example from php.net

// We'll be outputting a PDF
header('Content-type: application/pdf');

// It will be called downloaded.pdf
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="downloaded.pdf"');

// The PDF source is in original.pdf
readfile('original.pdf');

The actual files you should put outside the public folders, so no danger of users surfing directly to them.