403 error for hotlink on any image extension

[Asia_Expat]

I want to prevent hotlinking to any file on my server but still allow linking to my urls of course. Will this work and are there any caveats I should know about?...

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(.*)$ - [F,NC]

[encyclo]

Without testing, I believe the above will block all external referrers - including visitors coming from a search engine or external link. I assume this would be an unintended consequence ;)

You have to specify file types for hotlink protection.

[Asia_Expat]

Oh dear. I tried cobbling it together from old posts on webmasterworld and the code generated by cPanel.
Another problem I'm having is the fact that highlighting, pasting and posting from this forum is messing up the code and I don't know if it should be a pipe, a broken pipe, a question mark, or whatever.

[jdMorgan]

You can't hotlink-protect "pages" -- only the objects (images, scripts, stylesheets) included on those pages. Otherwise, as encyclo states, your site will become inaccessible.

Jim

[Asia_Expat]

OK how does this look? (I know the double pipes should be solid)...

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g¦gif¦bmp¦png)$ - [NC,F]

[jdMorgan]

Looks OK, but you should not have to handle the "www or not-www" case, and you shouldn't have to handle upper/lowercase domain variations -- These should already have been taken care of by a domain canonicalization redirect.

RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www\.example\.com
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g¦gif¦bmp¦png)$ - [NC,F]

Jim

[Asia_Expat]

Yeah, I do have the canonical issue taken care of in another area of the htaccess... thanks for pointing that out! :)