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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T22:34:39+00:00

It’s a common problem, solved many times, but for some reason i cannot find

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It’s a common problem, solved many times, but for some reason i cannot find the right information.

Some constraints and requirements:

  • Technique for LAMP stack.
  • Fine-grained control of which files are accessible.
  • No basic authentication with htpasswd files, i want to provide a custom login frontend.
  • Should be able to securely protect and serve big video files

How do all those sites protect their files from public without using basic authentication?

Thanks!

A similar question: Performance-oriented way to protect files on PHP level?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You would usually redirect any requests for the media files to a PHP script. The PHP script does the login authentication, and on success, loads the requested media file from a protected location, and passes it through to the browser, for example using fpassthru() or fread().

    You can set up a very elegant solution using a set of mod_rewrite instructions, for example rewriting 

    www.example.com/media/music.mp3

    internally to

    www.example.com/media/index.php?file=music.mp3

    the method is not cheap, as the PHP interpreter has to be started for every download, and pass through every byte of the file. For a discussion of possible alternatives, I asked a question about that a few months back: Performance-oriented way to protect files on PHP level?

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