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POSelective file download permission with Apache and PHP
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copied!<p>I have a website with a file download option. However not everyone is allowed to download every file. For example if I log in as administrator I can download all files, but if I log in as a customer I can only download certain files.</p> <p>Currently all these files are stored in a directory outside of the web root, so users can't download them manually. I made a PHP script to manage the downloading of files, but it's very buggy. I tried several things:</p> <p>1:</p> <pre><code>echo file_get_contents($file); </code></pre> <p>2:</p> <pre><code>readfile($file); </code></pre> <p>3:</p> <pre><code>if (($handle = fopen($file, "rb")) !== false) { while (!feof($handle)) { echo fread($handle, 4096); } fclose($handle); } </code></pre> <p>I found that all of these methods are very unreliable when testing with a 500MB file. The first and second both fail with all browsers and random percentages. Sometimes they already fail after a few megabytes, while other times they make it as far as 80%. But eventually they'll just stop downloading without any errors.</p> <p>The 3rd method is most reliable. It downloads well in Firefox (albeit way too slow; about 700KB/s while it's from localhost and the readfile-method goes at 25MB/s when it works) and Chrome but in Internet Explorer it mostly fails. In IE it first gets stuck on "getting file information" without getting any "Open/Save" dialog. When I cancel that and try again I get an "Open/Save" dialog.</p> <p>I searched the internet and I can't find any satisfying method that actually works well. Preferably I just want Apache to handle the file download since that always works perfectly without problems. But I don't want to put all files into a public directory since then everyone could download all files.</p> <p>What are my options? Is there a best method?</p>

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