How to Protect a Webpage with a Password
Suppose you want to protect the sub-page “secure” of your homepage with a password; that is you want that the visitors are asked for a username and a password when accessing a webpage:
- https://people.math.ethz.ch/~USERNAME/secure/
To do that you first have to create the directory “secure” with the correct permissions:
mkdir ~/www/secure chmod 755 ~/www/secure
Then you have to create a kind of configuration file in that directory, named .htaccess with the following content (you can use emacs, xemacs, vi, … as editor)
AuthName "This is my protected page..." AuthType Basic AuthUserFile /hg/w/www1/users/USERNAME/www/.htpasswd require valid-user
and change the permissions as follows:
chmod 644 ~/www/secure/.htaccess
As last step, you have to create a list of user(s) with password(s) (see the directive AuthUserFile above). To do that just enter the following command:
htpasswd -c ~/www/.htpasswd user1 New password: ****** Re-type new password: ****** Adding password for user user1
The option “-c” has to be used only the first time, since it will create the file .htpasswd. If you want to add more users, use the same command without the “-c”:
htpasswd ~/www/.htpasswd user2 New password: ****** Re-type new password: ****** Adding password for user user2
and check the permissions again:
chmod 644 ~/www/.htpasswd
