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I added this code to my .htaccess file

#deny all russian IP's
Order allow,deny
deny from .ru
Allow from all

My questions:

  1. Can it go anywhere in the file? I added it to the end.
  2. Do I put the code in the root .htaccess file? I have lots of .htaccess files; they are all over the place with a Prestashop site.

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    Just out of curiosity, why do you want that?
    – bipll
    Feb 19, 2018 at 23:59
  • I have a russian bot sending hundreds of messages on my contact page - its crashing my site and making it unusable for all my customers. I installed a SlideCaptcha but it appears to be able to go round it.
    – Chezzers
    Feb 20, 2018 at 5:07
  • So you do realize that you're blocking the whole large top-level domain in order to block something that is very likely to go on spamming you from a different segment? :-O
    – bipll
    Feb 20, 2018 at 7:10

2 Answers 2

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Can it go anywhere in the file?

Yes and no. In general, if you have added it to the end of the file, it should be fine. But the reason I say “yes and no” is without knowing the rest of the contents of the .htaccess file it’s impossible to give a definite answer. For all I know you have other allow/deny directives that might interfere with this one.

Do I put the code in the root .htaccess file?

Yes! It should go in the root. I am not completely clear on the logic of the other .htaccess files in a Prestashop site, but I cannot imaging those non-root .htaccess files will interfere. In general an .htaccess file at the root will cover all other paths beneath it.

That said, this kind of “hunt and peck” method does not effectively work since you need to constantly update it; it’s going to give you more headaches than it is worth.

Instead, if you are a system administrator and know how to use IPtables and IPSec then those tools are better alternatives to blocking whole IP ranges. They are faster, more robust and more flexible than just hacking away at .htaccess files endlessly. This thread on Server Fault explains the basics of doing country-bass IP address blocking using IPsec and IPtables and is worth a look.

But, again, since these are really deeper level OS tools for IP blocking, if you are not comfortable using tools like this, you might be better off just using .htaccess for the time being.

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    Just worth remembering - using iptables and such would look like your site isn't there. In theory, while his approach feels totally wrong, you might get an actual error message if his web server goes "eh, this russian ip. GO AWAY!"
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Feb 20, 2018 at 2:14
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I think... you don't quite get the relationship between IP addresses and domain names. Firstly typically, unless you explicitly set it up that way, one or more domains map to an ip address, not the other way around, and when you do set up rdns - your typical web server dosen't care about it. In short .ru dosen't mean anything in this context to your webserver.

You might ask... "But what about geoblocking?" - well, you'd basically find a list of ip addresses - aka a geoip database, and use some tool to do the blocking for you.

A .htaccess file is really an override for a specific directory. Its worth remembering apache actually dosen't recommend its use. If you want to block something, it should presumably set up in the main config file

Mucking around a bit - you can apparently get htaccess files from the internet with a list of IP ranges - the one I generated here's about 3mb for Russia - and I'm unsure of the effects of throwing about large IP address ranges to block on your server

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