.htaccess to block IP addresses

Wordfence can add the blocked IPs to .htaccess if you enable Falcon Engine on the Performance Setup menu — just make sure not to use other caching plugins at the same time.

Wordfence doesn’t use .htaccess unless Falcon is enabled, since .htaccess is a very important file — if people have a different caching plugin that often changes .htaccess and Wordfence was doing it at the same time, there is a chance for significant issues.

-Matt R

I use W3TC.

Is it possible to enable the .htaccess functionality by code, or is it mixed with Falcon Engine?

So, basically this is a WordPress issue, WordPress does not include any function to control the access to a file? (lock / synchronized)

Currently, the functionality cannot be separated, but the dev team is looking at this for other reasons as well. I think the locking issue is deeper even than WordPress alone, mainly because of the variation between different hosts, but if there is a good way to do it, it would be a good improvement. Thanks for the input!

-Matt R

Now that I realize, I think it is not hard to make sure that after a change to .htaccess the file is not broken.

Just a thought, you can do something like this:

• read the file
• insert your block code and save
• read the file again and compare it with the previous version, by removing your code in the new file
• if both versions are equal, you didn’t break it

Another option would be to save the contents in a temp file, then compare to the original and, if it OK, rename the temp file. I think a file rename should be faster than writing a file. So, less room for issues.

Surely you already know this, most of the plugins and WordPress use blocks like this

# BEGIN Wordfence
...
# END Wordfence

Yep, the bad part is that on busy sites, there may be 5 or 10 visits trying to modify the same file at almost the same time — when they overlap is where the trouble comes (one visit writes the file, a second one writes the same file, the first one reads it back, etc.)

The renaming option is more likely to work, but if two different plugins use the same approach, and multiple visits overlap, it still could cause some changes not to be included in the final file — but if there’s good way to do this without conflicts, the dev team will find it. ??

-Matt R

Yes, without having a way to lock the file there is always room for issues.

When you said “the dev team is looking at this for other reasons as well”, did you refer to separate the functionality from Falcon Engine or to make it available for regular users?

Yes, possibly using .htaccess separately from Falcon for certain functions, or other ways of reducing resource usage for blocked IPs.

-Matt R