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Rule-based Access Control for Apache

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Rule-based Access Control for Apache Apache provides a number of tools that allow administrators to control access to specific resources provided by servers. You may already be familiar with authentication based access controls, which requires that visitors authenticate to the server before gaining access to resources.

Apache’s rule-based access control allows you to specify which visitors have access to which resources on a very granular level. You can create rules which block a given range of IPs from your web server, or from accessing a particular resource, or even simply from accessing a particular virtual host.

The most basic use of rule-based access control is to place firm limits on what resources are accessible over the network connection. In the default Apache configuration, the web server denies all users access to all files on the system. Then Apache permits administrators to allow access to specific resources.

Additional uses for these access rules include blocking particular IP ranges that have been responsible for malicious traffic and limiting access to a given resource or set of resources to “internal users,” among a number of other possibilities.

We assume that you have a working installation of Apache and have access to modify configuration files. If you have not installed Apache, you might want to follow one of our Apache installation guides or LAMP stack installation guides. If you want a more thorough introduction to Apache configuration, please reference our Apache HTTP server configuration basics and Apache configuration structure guides.

Examples of Rule Based Access Control

You may wish to consult our Apache configuration structure guide to see a number of examples of these directives in practice.

Here is an example of a basic rule:

Apache Configuration Directive 
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Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 192.168.2.101

To parse this in more simple terms:

  • The Order Deny,Allow directive tells the web server that “Deny” rules should be processed before Allow rules.
  • The Deny from all directive tells the web server that all users should be denied access to the given resource. This rule is processed first.
  • The Allow from directive tells the web server that requests originating at the IP address 192.168.2.101 should be allowed. This is processed last, and represents an exception to the Deny from all rule.

In short, all hosts except for 192.168.2.101 are denied access to this resource.

Additional Access Control Rules

You can specify granular access control rules for your resources by modifying and expanding the example above. The following notes and suggestions provide some insight into some of the more advanced functionality that is possible with these access control systems.

Controlling Access for a Range of IPs

If you want to control access for a range of IP addresses rather than for a single address, Apache permits this with the following syntax:

Apache Configuration Directive 
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Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 192.168
Allow from 10

The above statements allow all addresses that begin with 192.168 and 10. These IP ranges are typically reserved for Local networking and are not publicly routable addresses. If used, these access control rules will only allow traffic from “local sources” on the network.

Here is an additional example of an access rule:

Apache Configuration Directive 
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Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from 185.201.1

This rule allows everyone access to the given resource, and then denies access to all IP addresses beginning with 185.201.1. This statement would cover all traffic originating from the range of IP addresses from 185.201.1.0 to 185.201.1.255.

When creating access control rules, particularly ones that use the Allow from all directive, be very sure that these directives are situated in the proper context.

Advanced Access Control

While IP address are by far the easiest way to control access using these access control rules, Apache provides a number of additional methods.

Firstly, Apache permits administrators to allow or deny access based on the hostname of the requester. This forces Apache to do a reverse DNS (rDNS) lookup of the hostname performing the request, and then allow or deny access based on this information. Consider this example:

Apache Configuration File 
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Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from hostname.example.com

Apache only allows requests from the machine with valid rDNS of hostname.example.com to access the resource in this configuration.

Secondly, it’s possible to build access rules around environment variables in the HTTP session. This allows you to allow and deny access to resources on the basis of variables such as browser (user agent) and referrer. Let us take the following example:

Apache Configuration File 
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SetEnvIf Referer searchenginez.com search_traffic
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from env=search_traffic

This access control rule works in conjunction with Apache’s mod_setenvif. First, if a request’s referrer matches searchenginez.com the environment variable search_traffic is set. Next, all hosts are denied access to the resource. Finally, requests that have the environment variable search_traffic set are allowed access to the resource. Please consult the official Apache documentation for mod_setenvif for more information about setting and using environment variables.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

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This guide is published under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license.