Preventing Hotlinking with Apache

On an Apache web server, you can use mod_rewrite and .htaccess to prevent any web page other than your own from accessing your graphic images.

Your .htaccess rule to block hotlinking will look something like this:


RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?internet-search-engines-faq.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ http://www.internet-search-engines-faq.com [R,NC]
To make this process easier, html basicx maintains a code generator which will create the correct .htaccess entries to prevent hotlinking.

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