Question

I have a symfony 1.4 application with an admin backend, and I would like to make some pdf / images available to authenticated users only. The authentication process is handled by symfony.

How can I make sure only authenticated users can download the files, even files exceeding php’s memory_limit setting?

The web server I use is nginx.

Answer 1

Use X-Sendfile (/X-Accel-Redirect), nginx will serve the file after the PHP script sends the appropriate headers and ends. This seems a proper explanation.

greg0ire > Here is my implementation with symfony 1.4 and nginx:

1. create a directory named “secure” under web
2. configure nginx like this:
3. create a symfony route
4. create a symfony action

Nginx configuration:

location /secure/ {
    internal;
  }

Symfony routing

SecureDownload:
  url: /anything-you-want-but-secure/:filename
  options:
    segment_separators: ['/'] # filenames often contain dots
  params:
    module: YourModule
    action: secureDownload

Symfony action

<?php
class SecureDownloadAction extends sfAction
{
  public function execute($request)
  {
    $this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader(
      "X-Accel-Redirect",
      "/secure/" . $request->getParameter('filename'));
    $this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader(
      "Content-Disposition",
      "attachement; filename=". $request->getParameter('filename'));
    return sfView::HEADER_ONLY;
  }
}