IP Address Based Restriction Using Htaccess File

Sometimes you need to restrict access to files in your webserver to certain IP address or IP range only. In such case, you can apply a simple .htaccess rule and this post provides an information on how to make IP based restriction Using .htaccess.

First, be sure to enable use of htaccess in apache in your distro.



An example of .htaccess file that will block requests from all IP addresses but the subnet of 192.168.0.0/16 is as below:

<limit GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 192.168
</limit>

Similarly, an example of .htaccess file that will allow requests from all IP addresses but the subnet of 192.168.0.0/16 is as below:

<limit GET>
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from 192.168
</limit>

You can also specify the individual IP addresses instead of the entire subnet according to your need. Also, note that there should be no space after the comma between allow,deny.

Once you create the .htaccess file, make sure you've provided proper permission to it.

samar@Techgaun:/var/www/samar$ chmod 0644 .htaccess

Once you have made the .htaccess file and provided the proper permission, you might need to restart the apache server(but per directory .htaccess does not require reloading the apache in most cases) so that new configurations will show an effect.

samar@Techgaun:/var/www/samar$ sudo service apache2 reload

I hope this comes handy :)