.htaccess Allow All from Specific User Agent

Question

I have a website I am developing that is also going to be pulled into a web app. I have the following code in my .htaccess file to prevent access from ANYONE th

Answer 1

I just want to allow ONE SPECIFIC user agent rather than trying to block all

Hi

What you need to consider here is that some bots (especially "larger" more prominent ones) will use several user-agents to access your site. For example, a Googlebot (crawler) can use all this different user-agents:

Googlebot-Image/1.0 
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
DoCoMo/2.0 N905i(c100;TB;W24H16) (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1;+htt://www.google.com/bot.html)
GoogleProducer 
SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Google-Site-Verification/1.0
Google-Test
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html) 

and I`m not event talking about Google Plus and many other bots used by Google.

Same goes for Yahoo and others.

Just this week our company (Incapsula) launched Botopedia.org - a Community-Sourced bot directory. It's 100% free and open for all and you can use it to find a complete user-agent list for all bots you`ll want to Allow.

If needed, it also has a Reverse IP functionality for Bot verification because, as our recent study of Fake Googlebot visits has shown, some spammer and even cyber-attackers will use legitimate bot signatures to ease their way into your site.

Hope this helps.