Consider a scenario, you have finally managed to create and host your first web app under a Linux system and you wanted your web app to lure continuous user traffic, you beautified it with some custom images of which you have full copyright.
However, while comparing different web apps with a similar spectrum to yours, you discover your custom images are being used without your consent. These secondary sites are using your images’ direct link to display them on their platforms. Each time your web app loads, your custom images also load on their web app platforms.
This issue is called image hotlinking and it’s quite difficult to link it to copyright violation since these platforms are only mirroring your images. If you are lucky enough to be using Nginx as your primary web server, we can find a workaround for this issue.
This article guide will walk us through configuring the Nginx web server to prevent image hotlinking in Linux.