Question

I have a url in this format: “sitename.com/folder/file.php”. How do I make it a “sitename.com/randomhash” or “sitename.com/folder/randomhash” format?

I know I can use a GET & Switch system but I need the name to be unique and I need to be able to change it on the fly.

Answer 1

I don’t really understand what your point is, but if you don’t want you’re visitors to know where your php-files are stored, I would recommend reading this:

Tutorial for URL handling in PHP

If you are having a website where people can download stuff, and you don’t want people hotlinking your files, you could do the following steps (i’m not writing the code, I’m just going to give you a general idea):

1. People come to your website.
2. Person clicks on link because they want to download that particular file.
3. Person comes on page, where you have the opportunity to set a cookie with a random hash.
4. Simultaneously you put a value in a database, with the same hash and the filepath of the file they want to download.
5. On this page, they have to click “DOWNLOAD NOW!”, where they are redirected to download.php.
6. In download.php you read the cookie, then match that with the database and get the filepath.
7. With the right php-headers, you can force download.php to download the file.

Important in this situation is that you set your settings of Apache (or whatever server you have) that downloading is not allowed unless ‘localhost’ is requesting it.