Preventing direct access to include file

[ali_kiyani]

Hi,

 

Let's say I have a page MAIN.PHP in which one file is being included as INCLUDES/FILE.PHP

 

I want to prevent direct access to FILE.PHP so that no body can do like this:

 

http://www.somewebsite.com/includes/file.php

 

All users should only be able to access like this:

 

http://www.somewebsite.com/main.php (and this main.php includes the other file.php file)

 

Is there some $_SERVER variable available to check if the file being accessed is currently running inside some other file or not!? Or is there another way of doing it.

 

Thanks

[genericnumber1]

The easiest and most secure way is to put it in a directory outside of your htdocs directory. Other solutions would be to disallow direct access to the includes directory using .htaccess, or to set a constant and check in all included files if that constant is set.

 

For instance:

<?php
define('INCLUDED_FILE', true);
include('somefile.php');
?>

in somefile.php:

<?php
if(!defined('INCLUDED_FILE')) {
   die('You may not access this file directly');
}
?>

[ali_kiyani]

Oh yes I already did it. This method is the simplest one works fine and I feel stupid of not thinking about it earlier. Thanks.