FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Basic Access Control with Apache

Certain parts of your website will almost certainly need to be protected from being viewed by the general public; access control allows you to restrict these sections to authorized users either by hostname/IP address or by password authentication. We’ll take a look at both of these methods.

Access Control by Address

Let’s say you want to restrict a certain file, directory, or set of files and directories to a short list of fixed IP addresses or hostnames. You can do this at the global (httpd.conf) level if you have a permanent area of your site (such as a set of administration scripts) that you want to keep secure; or more efficiently for regular users or for temporary private resources, you can use an .htaccess ...