A 30 second recap on how to protect your site with a username and password using .htaccess

• Find and run 'htpasswd -c /var/www/html/sec/pass.htpasswd ryan'

-c is to create a new file, ryan is the username. You'll be prompted for a password

• Create a .htaccess in the directory you want to protect and add the following lines:

AuthName "Secure Login"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile "/var/www/html/sec/pass.htpasswd"
require valid-user

Here we're saying the user just needs to exist in the file we created earlier, for more detailed setups, use google.

• Ensure that 'AllowOveride All' is set for the directory in which .htaccess lives, otherwise the config file wont be processed.

Cheers
Ryan Partington

The .htaccess can be used for many apache http server functions. Today we're going to take a quick look at 'force type'. Force Type allows you present a webpage in another format than default. For example, if we have index.html but would like apache to process it as php, we could add

<Files article>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

to the .htaccess file. This allows you to create a site which looks static (.htm or .html) but process the data and content as php.

Once place I use this is with the article page, if you click in to this article it would look something like this http://ryanpartington.com/article/freewebdesign/ - article is actually a php page, and I pass the variable freewebdesign/ to a MySQL query.

Thanks
Ryan Partington