Question

I have an RSS feed, users will be using it to rip content to display on there site. However I need todo a check that the site doing so has access.

Its just occurred to me that I have no idea in PHP how to detect if the script is being read by a server and what the URL is of the fetch.

Is it possible?

Answer 1

The best approaches for this are…

1. Give each rss reader it’s own key (or maybe even login, password). You’ll be sure that nobody can read your RSS without key.
2. You can allow reading rss only from ips from allowed list.
3. Checking referer, but it’s not a good idea, because referer could be faked as well as any HTTP header.