A harder hotlinking challenge in .htaaccess...

Redirecting to a URL based on filename they tried to access

[Sovi3t]

Hi all,

I've been having aproblem with people hotlinking to the zip files hosted on my server. My bandwidth is limited, and google is paying less and less. To fix this, I would like visitors to be redirected to a download page when accessing a zip on my server that they were brought to from a different site.

So here's a sample scenario of what I WANT to happen:

1) A user goes to example.com (NOT my site) and tries to download a file on my server, FILE_NAME_HERE.zip (FILE_NAME_HERE can be any one of about 150 files).

2) Instead of directly downloading it, they are brought to www.mysitenamehere.com/download.php?file=FILE_NAME_HERE, where it displays an ad and starts the download within a few seconds.

3) They download the file, everything is fine and dandy. I get paid for the bandwidth (in the form of showing google ads) the hotlinking site would have stolen had I not put in protection.

Any suggestions or help is greatly appreciated!

[Marino]

Hello,

This should work :

RewriteCond ([^/]+)\.zip$
RewriteRule ^.*$ www.mysitenamehere.com/download.php?file=%1 [R,L]

%1 will be replaced by the first matching sub-pattern of the RewriteCond ([^/]+), ie the file name without the extension.

[Sovi3t]

Thanks a lot Marino, i'll try it out!

[Marino]

Sorry, I've been a bit too fast writing my previous post :

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} ([^/]+)\.zip$
RewriteRule ^.*$ www.mysitenamehere.com/download.php?file=%1 [R,L]

Guess this will work better. Well, this time, the syntax is correct...

[Sovi3t]

Wow! This works great!

The only problem is that I have to allow blank referrers due to firewall problems, and sites can do a JS popup in IE to the file (no refferer). But there is no way to fix this, because I don't want some firewall users to have problems downloading.

I was wondering if you could please exaplin some on it to me, especially the %1 part. It's only in the code once and it's automatically set the the filename.

Thanks once again!

[jdMorgan]

You can shorten that code and speed it up a bit:

RewriteRule ([^/.]+)\.zip$ www.mysitenamehere.com/download.php?file=$1 [R,L]

For information on $1 and %1 back-references, see the Apache mod_rewrite documentation cited in our forum charter [webmasterworld.com]. The mod_rewrite documentation describes back-references in the RewriteCond and RewriteRule sections.

Jim