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If you're migrating a website from Apache Webserver to Nginx to boost performance and better Utilize your servers hardware and the websites (Virtualhosts) has sections with implemented Apache .htaccess / .htaccess password authentication, you will have to migrate also Apache directory password protection to Nginx.

This is not a hard task as NginX's password protection uses same password format as Apache and Nginx password protection files are generated with standard htpasswd part of apache2-utils package (on Debian / Ubuntu servers) and httpd-tools on CentOS / Fedora / RHEL. If you're migrating the Apache websites to Nginx on a fresh new installed server and website developers are missing htpasswd tool to install it depending on Linux distro:

On Debian / Ubuntu deb based servers, install htpasswd with:

apt-get install –yes apache2-utils
…

On CentOS / Fedora … other RPM based servers:

yum -y install httpd-tools
…

Once installed if you need to protect new section site still being in development with password with Nginx, do it as usual with htpasswd
 

htpasswd -c /home/site/nginx-websitecom/.htpaswd admin

Note that if .htpasswd file has already exist and has other user records, to not overwritted multiple users / passes and  let all users in file login to Nginx HTTP auth with separate passwords, do:

htpasswd /var/www/nginx-websietcom/.htpasswd elijah

Now open config file of Nginx Vhost and modify it to include configuration like this:

server {
       listen 80;
       server_name www.nginx-website.com nginx-website.com;
       root /var/www/www.nginx-website.com/www;
[…]
       location /test {
                auth_basic "Restricted";
                auth_basic_user_file /var/www/www.example.com/.htpasswd;
       }
[…]
}

Do it for as many Vhosts as you have and to make the new settings take affect restart Nginx:

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

Enjoy 🙂

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Tags: com, file, htpasswd, HTTP, passwords, protection, servers, var, website, www

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Linux, Nginx, Various, Web and CMS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.