Practical Internet Groupware

Basic Authentication for Apache

To implemented shared-account authentication in Apache, start by creating a user account and assigning a password to that account. You can do that with the htpasswd tool, like this:

htpasswd -c subscribers subscriber

This command prompts for a password and when you supply one, it creates a file called subscribers containing a single record for a user named subscriber, along with an encrypted version of the password you type in.

To control access to all the files in a directory, you need to associate the user account with a web subtree. In Apache, you do that in the server’s configuration file (either access.conf or the master file httpd.conf ) like this:

<Directory /web/Docbase/ProductAnalysis/docs>
AuthType Basic
AuthName subscribers
AuthUserFile /secure/subscribers
require user valid-user
</Directory>

Group Authentication in Apache

You can define a group of subscribers by listing names in a file, like this:

subscribers: ed joe sharon

If that group definition is stored in the file /secure/groups , you can use the following configuration directives to permit only group members:

<Directory /web/Docbase/ProductAnalysis/docs>
AuthType Basic
AuthName subscribers
AuthUserFile /secure/subscribers
AuthGroupFile /secure/groups
require group subscribers
</Directory>

In this case, you have to define the group in /secure/groups and also list all the individual subscribers and their passwords in /secure/subscribers .

Managing Larger Groups in Apache

If there are ...