Drupal enable private file system

The easier it gets to get up a powerful, custom-made Drupal site up and running, with just some tweaking and modules mixing and matching, the higher are the chances that you mess up key configuration settings.

And that you expose priceless private data all over the internet. So, the question that arises now is: how to secure private files in Drupal? How do you set up a private file system? And how do you properly and safely configure your private Drupal files permissions? There are a couple of tweaks that you can do for strategically structuring your file system and thus preventing the exposure of your Drupal private files to the internet. Therefore, content served on your website can be either:.

It goes without saying that all these scenarios involve users uploading files e. So, you'll need to structure your file system accordingly. Particularly if you're not familiar with the way some of the modules on your Drupal site work. Typically placing files within the sites document root isn't the recommended approach. Having it within the normal files directory though does make managing the files easier through the CMS.

That's basically how the system knows to check for permissions. Again, ideally new files uploaded through IMCE would be stored properly, but right now it just deals with all public files. In Drupal 7, there was a handy module that stepped in here to provide custom access permissions as well as mixing public and private uploads. It's called Private files download permission but unfortunately a version for Drupal 8 doesn't exist.

We'll have to instead implement a custom check using basically the same hook. The below example just checks whether the user is logged in at all. You could expand on this though to start checking for roles and other criteria, which is partly what the above mentioned module does in Drupal 7. Having said all of the above, the hope is that IMCE will either be updated to work with private files, or better yet, Drupal core gets new media handling capabilities.

There has been an ongoing discussion regarding media management that looks promising. Back to Blog Private files in Drupal 8. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How do I set the private file system path's permissions? Ask Question. Asked 6 years, 10 months ago. Active 2 years, 10 months ago. Viewed 3k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. I'm using this module and it always shows a forbidden message! You can specify if files in directory should be available for user or role. Just be sure that you are not using too many permission modules for private files.

I've done that before.