Question

I read here lot of answers about protecting a file on apache server, some told htaccess is only for deny user access for files. For me not..

Using the following lines I cant reach the xml, BUT my php script also can’t!

<Files sample.xml>
  Order allow,deny
  Deny from all
</Files>

So how to protect a file from users, so that my php script could access it. The file is in the root dir.

Answer 1

If you are on a linux server, have a shell access to it, you change your file permissions to

chmod 0700 yourxmlfile.xml  # this will make it readable/writable/executable only by the creator of the file.

or in your .htaccess file, you can do this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^yourfile.xml$ 404.html

where your 404.html could be either a page not found page or any garbage page, which will display as invalid url.