Blocking a directory of a website via DNS

@AireServ

Unless your router allows for the configuration of a destination or redirect, no. Some routers provide more advanced options, some not so much. It all boils down to what the firmware allows for.

@AireServ

Are you wanting to actually block access to the directory, or simply prevent visitors from being able to view the index listing of the directory?

If you want to simply prevent a directory listing, dropping an index.html or index.php file in will prevent others from being able to view a listing of other files (but it will not prevent them from being able to access other files if they happen to guess file names i.e. random_filename.png, for example).

The other methods will require you to modify NGINX configuration, primarily the server block for the website. You’d need to login via SSH and pull up the website server block which should be located in:

/etc/nginx/sites-available

or

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled

Generally, sites-available is symlinked to sites-enabled, so you’d modify the file in the first and the second would be automatically updated.

To block access, you’d want to drop a location block in to the file, which would look something like:

location ~ /folder1 {
    deny all;
}

You’ll want to make sure you add that before other blocks, such as a location block that allows PHP files to be accessed:

location ~ \.php$ {
    ....
}

So, for example, it should look like this:

location ~ /folder1 {
    deny all;
}

location ~ \.php$ {
    ....
}

and not:

location ~ \.php$ {
    ....
}

location ~ /folder1 {
    deny all;
}

You can also block multiple directories using a single block, like so:

location ~ /(folder1|folder2|folder3) {
    deny all;
}

You would simply swap out folder1, folder2, and folder3 with the paths to the folders you want to block.

That being said, the above also will not block access to files, only to the directory itself. So if someone guesses a random filename, they will still be able to access it.

Example:

example.com/content/iwantthisblocked will be denied.

example.com/content/iwantthisblocked/filename.html will not be denied.