Apache Cookbook, 2nd Edition

6.10. Lifting Restrictions Selectively

Problem

You want most documents to be restricted, such as requiring a username and password, but want a few to be available to the public. For example, you may want index.html to be publicly accessible, whereas the rest of the files in the directory require password authentication.

Solution

Use the Satisfy Any directive in the appropriate place in your .htaccess or httpd.conf file:

<Files index.html>
    Order Deny,Allow
    Allow from all
    Satisfy Any
</Files>

You can locate this in a .htaccess file, or within a <Directory> container to limit its effect:

<Directory "/usr/local/apache/htdocs">
    Satisfy All
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
    <Files *.html>
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
        Satisfy Any
    </Files>
</Directory>

Discussion

Regardless of what sorts of restrictions you may have on other files, or on the directory as a whole, the <Files> container in the solution makes the index.html file accessible to everyone without limitation. Satisfy Any tells Apache that any of the restrictions in place may be satisfied, rather than having to enforce any particular one. In this case, the restriction in force will be Allow from all, which permits access for all clients.

This method can be easily extended to apply to arbitrary filename patterns using shell global characters. To extend it to use regular expressions for the filename, use the <FilesMatch> directive instead.

Weak and Strong Authentication

The basic Apache security model for HTTP is based on the concepts of weak ...