I was working on a site recently that password protected a directory and I found it interesting. I decided to try it out on my home Ubuntu box.
The Setup
First we need to let Apache know about the directory we want to protect. Navigate to the Apache config file.
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
Add the following to the end of the file. In my example I’ll be protecting the /var/www/html/protected directory.
<Directory /var/www/html/protected> Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory>
Then we need to create the directory to password protect on our web server. Use /var/www/html/protected as we identified above.
sudo mkdir /var/www/html/protected
Next we need to make a file that holds the username and password that we will be setting to protect the directory. In a live server setting, you need to ensure this file is not accessible from the outside world so using /var/www is a great location to save this file. I will be calling the file httpass. Notice in this example, sdatic is the username and httpass is the filename. You will be prompted to type a password twice.
sudo htpasswd -c /var/www/httpass sdatic
Next you will need to change the ownership of the folder so that Apache can access it.
sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/httpass
Now we need to setup the directly to use this information. We will do this with an .htaccess file. I’ll use Nano.
sudo nano /var/www/protected/.htaccess
Enter the following into the file.
AuthType Basic AuthName "Restricted Access" AuthUserFile /var/www/httpass Require user sdatic
Let’s make sure this file is owned by Apache.
sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/protected/.htaccess
Restart Apache.
sudo service apache2 restart
Now if you navigate to your web server you will be prompted for a username and password. My LAN address is 10.0.0.100 and the directory is /protected.
Conclusion
Since this is an internal network I don’t have a lot of need for this but you never know when it might come in handy for an internal or external hosting server. Let me know if you have any use for this or would like to see how to do this on another platform than Debian/Ubuntu.
