I want to achieve selective authentication based on QUERY_STRING on Apache 2.2. using a .htaccess file.
The challenge that I have is that QUERY_STRING does not appear to be visible to the directives that are processed before the Allow and Deny directives, such as SetEnvIf. Setting the environment variable via RewriteRule happens too late for authentication purposes, if I have understood correctly. Apache 2.4. provides the If clause which has access to QUERY_STRING, and probably would be useful, but unfortunately I am locked to 2.2. I understand that using the [F] flag of RewriteRule I could block access entirely to index.php while allowing access to index.php?authentication=0, but I am unaware of how to do the same with authentication.
Any ideas on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
