Block blank user-agents bots but make exception for ip address possible?

Question

I have the following in my .htaccess file on website2, but when my other website on website1 makes requests to website2 it is blocked because the server user-agent is blank.

Is there are a way to allow a single IP address into the code below, or some other method to block the empty user-agent bots but allow my website1 to make requests to files on website2?

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent ^$ bad_bot #leave this for blank user-agents
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^more-bad-bots" bad_bot

<Limit GET POST HEAD>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>

Answer 1

... because the server user-agent is blank.

Why not set a user-agent in your script? You shouldn't be making HTTP requests with blank user-agents. (If using PHP then this may be as simple as calling ini_set('user_agent','my-user-agent'))

Is there a way to allow a single IP address

You can unset the bad_bot environment variable if the requesting IP is known. For example:

# Leave this for blank user-agents
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent ^$ bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^more-bad-bots" bad_bot

# Unset bad_bot if request is from 203.0.113.111
SetEnvIf Remote_Addr ^203\.0\.113\.111$ !bad_bot

:

I've also removed your line-end comment - Apache does not support them! That "line-end comment" was setting 5 additional environment variables: #leave, this, for, blank and user-agents!

Apache only supports full-line comments.