Password protecting directory

[btwyx]

I've tried several times and failed to get password protection to work. I've read lots of forum post here about how to get it to work, and other general stuff, but nothing helps.

When I set up an .htaccess file, I'll get an ugly authentication dialog in Safari, but whatever I enter it always pops up again. It's never satisfied. If I hit the cancel button, it gives an "Authorization Required" error.

A lot of forum posts are about the correct path for AuthUserFile, so what is the correct path. It seemed to change a while back, and is different than you get with pwd in the shell.

Any other thoughts to get this to work?

[joemuller]

Hi, you'll need a couple things to make password-protecting a directory work:
1.) A .htaccess file in the directory that you want to protect (this will apply to that directory and any files/folders inside of it) *
2.) A .htpasswd file in that same directory *

The .htaccess file will need a section that looks something like this:

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AuthType Basic
AuthName "Password Required"
AuthUserFile .htpasswd
Require valid-user

Then you'll need a .htpasswd file in the same directory - these can be generated/modified using the htpasswd utility on shell.sonic.net or any number of online generators, and will look something like this:

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ausername:$passwordhashgoeshere
busername:$anotherpasswordhash

I suspect that your .htpasswd file is somewhere outside of the hosting directory for your site, so that's why it's not working. (See the 'gotcha' below. Hopefully the above info should be enough to fix any issues, but let me know if it doesn't work.

-- Joe M

* A quick 'gotcha' is that these cannot cross into another website root. Often, if you have multiple websites, each will live in its own directory under public_html (or /var/www/html/, etc) - those sites cannot access things in directories 'above' them, so the highest place your .htaccess and .htpasswd files can go is where your main Index page resides.

[btwyx]

That's pretty much what I've done the several times already, and the result is exactly the same.

Just to make sure I copied all your stuff, and still exactly the same. The .htaccess and .htpassword file are all in the same directory.

[btwyx]

I got a private message about this, but the forum software isn't letting me reply to it.