Question

i want to make users to be able to upload PHP files and download them without executing them,
i need to turn off PHP for a specific directory so it behaves as plain text.

i tried this but is it a proper solution ?

RemoveHandler .php .phtml .php3
RemoveType .php .phtml .php3
php_flag engine off

Answer 1

You can use a Proxy Script to handle this.

In your .htaccess file, you can redirect all the requests in the folder to change to this way:

http://example.com/uploads/myfilewithadminaccess.php

To

http://example.com/uploads/index.php?file=myfilewithadminaccess.php

Source of .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ ./index.php?file=$1 [L]

And in the index.php just parse the file and give the output.

Source of index.php:

<?php
    header("Content-type: text/html");
    $filename = (file_exists("uploads/" . $_GET["file"])) ? "uploads/" . $_GET["file"] : "error.txt";
    $filecont = file_get_contents($filename);
    echo htmlspecialchars($filecont);
?>

Fiddle: http://codepad.viper-7.com/68FSIU

Note: You need to sanitize the inputs before you allow URLs to pass. So, people might inject ../, etc. those should be taken care.

Hope this helps and it is perfectly fine.