Basic Authentication For Apache

Goal, make the directory /spot/ require a user name and password, using the simplist possible method.

ok first make sure you have the mods, auth_digest, I'm using debian so its here

  ls -l /etc/apache2/mods-available/auth_digest.load

Now make sure its linked in, again with debain this just requires a soft link, other distros will need to make conf changes to their http.conf

  ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/auth_digest.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/auth_digest.load

Now we need to change the directory settings

  Alias "/spot/" /my/special/spot
  <Directory /my/special/spot >
     AuthType digest
     AuthName personal_info
     AuthDigestFile /etc/apache2/digest/personal_info
     Require user friend family
  </Directory>

You can see I've specified a file, we'll need to go make that. The "-c" option creates the file.

  sudo mkdir /etc/apach2/digest/
  htpasswd2 -c /etc/apache2/digest/personal_info friend
  htpasswd2 /etc/apache2/digest/personal_info family 

Now restart

  sudo /usr/sbin/apache2ctl graceful

all done test it out!
now restart and it should work