Creating a Secure File Hosting Server for PDFs

Question

I\'m working to develop a website that allows clients to log in and see various PDFs saved on the server. These PDFs will be unique to the client and should no

Answer 1

John posted the primary correct way of doing it, so I'm adding the (probably inferior) alternative: Serve it from the database. Just have a BLOB column for the PDF, and read/store the file data from the database. You'll end up with a quite large table, but it will work. Serving it requires setting the same header()s as John posted, you just send off the data from the DB instead of from the file.

This has the advantage of not having to ensure you don't have filename collisions, etc.