NGINX Cookbook

How to do it...

In order to provide basic authentication, we first need to create a password file. We can do this with the htpasswd utility, which is part of the Apache tools. It's important that we don't store this file in a publicly accessible directory, otherwise your usernames and passwords will be compromised.

Here's how to create the password file and add the siteadmin username to it:

htpasswd -c /var/www/private/.htpasswd siteadmin 

The htpasswd utility will then prompt you for a password. While we could specify this via the command line, it would also mean that your password is logged in plain text within your bash history. Ensuring that the password is entered via stdin reduces the risks of compromise if your log files are exposed. ...