htaccess doesn't work - always wrong password

Question

I am trying to password protect a directory, and have two files in the directory which should password protected it:

• .htaccess
• .htpasswd

HTACCESS:

###Contents of .htaccess:
AuthUserFile /var/www/html/path/to/my/directory/.htpasswd
AuthName "Protected Files"
AuthType Basic
Require user admin

HTPASSWD:

###Contents of .htpasswd
admin:oxRHPuqwKiANY

The password is also admin, but no matter what password I try, it is always wrong. It immediately asks for the password again!

What is wrong with this configuration?

Answer 1

This problem is almost always because apache cannot read the .htpasswd file. There are four causes that come to mind:

1. it isn't parsing the path correctly... how did you create the .htaccess file? Does it have unix line endings (versus say using Notepad in Windows?

2. is the path correct? What does the following command (with the path update) show? ls -l /var/www/html/path/to/my/directory/.htpasswd

3. does the web server have access to the file? chmod 644 and see if that solves the problem.

4. it can't parse the .htpasswd file: in this case, you are using the crypt() encryption so it does seem you created the file on Linux and it is probably fine. Some types of encryption only work on certain platforms, if in doubt try switching to MD5.

You may find helpful messages in the Apache error log.

My money is on #3.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue using MAMP and it was because i was creating .htpasswd by hand. Solution was to use htpasswd command in terminal:

htpasswd -bc .htpasswd someuser somepass

this created the .htpasswd file which worked fine with my .htaccess file which looked like so:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "This site is in alpha and requires a password."
AuthUserFile "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/mywebsite/.htpasswd"
require valid-user

Answer 3

There's a small chance you're seeing password protection from a parent folder, not the folder you expect.

If your /etc/apache2/sites-enabled folder has only one file in it, check to see if it has a section for your sites folder, something like:

<Directory /var/www/mysite.com>
   AllowOverride All
</Directory> 

otherwise, if it has a file for your site name, like:

/etc/apache/sites-enabled/YOUR_SITE_NAME_HERE.conf

edit that file instead, and make sure that there's an

AllowOverride All

in there. That's the important part! If you want to only allow the minimum, specify:

AllowOverride AuthConfig

instead.

Answer 4

I had the same problem. Turned out the issue was this line:

Require user admin

If you specify admin you can only access the directory with admin even if you have other users in the .htpasswd file.

If you want to specify the users in the .htpasswd file, you can change the line to:

Require valid-user

Answer 5

My problem was that I did not give an absolute path for the AuthFile line.

Answer 6

I had the same issue.

• The password should have specified encryption:

CRYPT_STD_DES - Standard DES-based hash with a two character salt from the alphabet "./0-9A-Za-z".

function standard_salt(){
$a = array_merge(range(0,9),range('a','z'),range('A','Z'));
return (string) $a[rand(0,count($a)-1)].$a[rand(0,count($a)-1)];
}

echo(crypt("admin",standard_salt()));

example:

admin:dsbU.we73eauE

Onlione javascript encripter is also available.

If it still does not work, take care of these:

• use unix linebreaks
• use correct AuthUserFile path, You can get it using: echo $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
• set file readable: chmod(".htpasswd",0644);

Answer 7

Also, make sure your password file is ANSI-encoded.

Answer 8

I spent about 2 hours to resolve the same issue. But problem was in nginx. I have nginx as front web server and there was a line for proxy configuration:

proxy_set_header Authorization "";

It overrides Authorization field and apache don't receive login and password typed in.

I just commented out this line and it worked.