Prevent people from accessing your classes and include files directly

Question

I'm making my own MVC framework and I remember seeing something like this in phpBB forums index page code:

define('IN_PHPBB', true);

and then in the files that are only ment to be included and not directly accessed it has this at the top:

if(!defined('IN_PHPBB')) {
    die();
}

I was wondering if that is neccessary especially with class files because if they are directly accessed they won't run anyway since they were not instantiated.

Answer 1

I suggest to you to put a file .htaccess with with the directive deny from all inside the folder with your php class files. The official documentation is here