Disable PHP in directory (including all sub-directories) with .htaccess

I'm making a website which allows people to upload files, html pages, etc... Now I'm having a problem. I have a directory structure like this:

-/USERS
    -/DEMO1
    -/DEMO2
    -/DEMO3
    -/etc... (every user has his own direcory here)
-index.php
-control_panel.php
-.htaccess

Now I want to disable PHP, but enable Server-side includes in the direcories and subdirectories inside /USERS

Can this be done (and how :) )? Thanks in advance.

BTW, I use WAMP server

Try to disable the engine option in your .htaccess file:

php_flag engine off

To disable all access to sub dirs (safest) use:

<Directory full-path-to/USERS>
     Order Deny,Allow
     Deny from All
 </Directory>

If you want to block only PHP files from being served directly, then do:

1 - Make sure you know what file extensions the server recognizes as PHP (and dont' allow people to override in htaccess). One of my servers is set to:

# Example of existing recognized extenstions:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml .php3

2 - Based on the extensions add a Regular Expression to FilesMatch (or LocationMatch)

 <Directory full-path-to/USERS>
     <FilesMatch "(?i)\.(php|php3?|phtml)$">
            Order Deny,Allow
            Deny from All
    </FilesMatch>
 </Directory>

Or use Location to match php files (I prefer the above files approach)

<LocationMatch "/USERS/.*(?i)\.(php3?|phtml)$">
     Order Deny,Allow
     Deny from All
</LocationMatch>

If you're using mod_php, you could put (either in a .htaccess in /USERS or in your httpd.conf for the USERS directory)

RemoveHandler .php

or

RemoveType .php

(depending on whether PHP is enabled using AddHandler or AddType)

PHP files run from another directory will be still able to include files in /USERS (assuming that there is no open_basedir restriction), because this does not go through Apache. If a php file is accessed using apache it will be serverd as plain text.

Edit

Lance Rushing's solution of just denying access to the files is probably better

This will display the source code instead of executing it:

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName sourcecode.testserver.me
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example
    AddType text/plain php
</VirtualHost>

I used it once to enable other co-worker to have read access to the source code from the local network (just a quick and dirty alternative).

WARNING !:

As Dan pointed it out sometime ago, this method should never be used in production. Please follow the accepted answer as it blocks any attempt to execute or display php files.

If you want users to share php files (and let others to display the source code), there are better ways to do it, like git, wiki, etc.

This method should be avoided! (you have been warned. Left it here for educational purposes)

<Directory /your/directorypath/>
     php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>

None of those answers are working for me (either generating a 500 error or doing nothing). That is probably due to the fact that I'm working on a hosted server where I can't have access to Apache configuration.

But this worked for me :

RewriteRule ^.*\.php$ - [F,L]

This line will generate a 403 Forbidden error for any URL that ends with .php and ends up in this subdirectory.

@Oussama lead me to the right direction here, thanks to him.

This might be overkill - but be careful doing anything which relies on the extension of PHP files being .php - what if someone comes along later and adds handlers for .php4 or even .html so they're handled by PHP. You might be better off serving files out of those directories from a different instance of Apache or something, which only serves static content.

On production I prefer to redirect the requests to .php files under the directories where PHP processing should be disabled to a home page or to 404 page. This won't reveal any source code (why search engines should index uploaded malicious code?) and will look more friendly for visitors and even for evil hackers trying to exploit the stuff. Also it can be implemented in mostly in any context - vhost or .htaccess. Something like this:

<DirectoryMatch "^${docroot}/(image|cache|upload)/">
    <FilesMatch "\.php$">
        # use one of the redirections
        #RedirectMatch temp "(.*)" "http://${servername}/404/"
        RedirectMatch temp "(.*)" "http://${servername}"
    </FilesMatch>
</DirectoryMatch>

Adjust the directives as you need.

If you use php-fpm, the php_admin_value will NOT work and gives an Internal Server Error.

Instead use this in your .htaccess. It disables the parser in that folder and all subfolders:

<FilesMatch ".+\.*$">
    SetHandler !
</FilesMatch>

I use in Centos 6.10 for multiple folders in virtual host .conf definitioin file:

<DirectoryMatch ^/var/www/mysite/htdocs/(nophpexecutefolder1|nophpexecutefolder2)>
       php_admin_value engine Off
</DirectoryMatch>

However, even though it doesn't parse php code the usual way it still outputs from a .php things such as variable declarations and text when doing echo e.g.

<?php

echo "<strong>PHP CODE EXECUTED!!";

$a=1;
$b=2;

echo $a+$b;

The above produces in web browser?

PHP CODE EXECUTED!!"; $a=1; $b=2; echo $a+$b;

This could potentially expose some code to users which isn't ideal.

Therefore, it's probably best to use the above in combination with the following in .htaccess:

<FilesMatch ".*.(php|php3|php4|php5|php6|php7|php8|phps|pl|py|pyc|pyo|jsp|asp|htm|html|shtml|phtml|sh|cgi)$">
 Order Deny,Allow
 Deny from all
  #IPs to allow access to the above extensions in current folder
  # Allow from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/32 XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/32
</FilesMatch>

The above will prevent access to any of the above file extensions but will allow other extensions such as images, css etc. to be accessed the usual way. The error when accessing .php:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /nophpexecutefolder1/somefile.php on this server.

<Files *.php>
    Order deny,Allow
    Deny from all
</Files>