| Authentication is any process by which you verify that someone is who s/he claims to be. Authorization is any process by which someone is allowed to be where s/he wants to go, or to have information that they want to have. | If you have information on your Web site that is sensitive or intended for only a small group of people, the techniques in this article will help you make sure that the people that see those pages are the people that you wanted to see them. |
The Prerequisites |
| Everything from here on assumes that your web server permits .htaccess files. This is something that your server administrator (assuming that's not you) should easily be able to tell you and set up for you. The relevant directive is the AllowOverride directive. | And you'll need to know a little bit about the directory structure of your server, in order to know where some files are kept. This should not be terribly difficult, and I'll try to make this clear when we come to that point. |
Beginning with the Basics |
Here are the basics of password protecting a directory on your server.
You'll need to create a password file. This file should be placed somewhere outside of your document directory. This is so folks cannot download the password file. For example, if your documents are served out of /usr/local/apache/htdocs you might want to put the password file (s) in /usr/local/apache/passwd. | To create the file, use the htpasswd utility that came with Apache. This is located in the bin directory of wherever you installed Apache. To create the file, type: htpasswd -c /usr/local/apache/passwd/password rbowen htpasswd will ask you for the password and then ask you to type it again to confirm it: |
# htpasswd -c /usr/local/apache/passwd/passwords rbowen
New password: mypassword
Re-type new password: mypassword
Adding password for user rbowen
If htpasswd is not in your path, of course you'll have to type the full path to the file to get it to run. On my server, it's located at /usr/local/apache/bin/htpasswd | Next, you'll need to create a file in the directory you want to protect. This file is usually called .htaccess, although on Windows it's called htaccess (without the leading period). .htaccess needs to contain the following lines: |
| AuthType Basic AuthName "By Invitation Only" AuthUserFile /usr/local/apache/passwd/passwords AuthGroupFile /dev/null require user rbowen | The next time that you load a file from that directory, you should see the familiar username/password dialog box pop up. If you don't chances are pretty good that you are not permitted to use .htaccess files in the directory in question. |
Letting More Than One Person In |
| The directives above only let one person (specifically someone with a username of rbowen) into the directory. In most cases, you'll want to let more than one person in. This is where the AuthGroupFile comes in. In the example above, we've pointed AuthGroupFile to /dev/null, which is Unix-speak for "nowhere" or "off into space." (The Windows NT equivalent of this is nul.) | If you want to let more than one person in, you'll need to create a group file that associates group names with a list of users in that group. The format of this file is pretty simple, and you can create it with your favourite editor. The contents of the file will look like this: |
GroupName: rbowen dpitts sungo rshersey |
That's just a list of the members of the group in a long line separated by spaces.
To add a user to your already existing password file, type:
htpasswd /usr/local/apache/passwd/password dpitts
You'll get the same response as before, but it will be appended to the existing file, rather than creating a new file. (It's the -c that makes it create a new password file.) | Now, you need to modify your .htaccess file to look like the following:
AuthType Basic
AuthName "By Invitation Only"
AuthUserFile /usr/local/apache/passwd/passwords
AuthGroupFile /usr/local/apache/passwd/groups
require group GroupName
|
| Now, anyone that is listed in the group GroupName and has an entry in the password file, will be let in if they type the correct password. | There's another way to let multiple users in that is less specific. Rather than creating a group file, you can just use the following directive: |
require valid-user
Using that rather than the required user rbowen line will allow anyone in that is listed in the password file and who correctly enters his/her password. You can even emulate the group behaviour here by keeping a separate password file for each group. The advantage of this approach is that Apache only has to check one file, rather than two. The disadvantage is that you have to maintain a bunch of password files, and remember to reference the right one in the AuthUserFile directive. | Possible Problems
Because of the way that basic authentication is specified, your username and password must be verified every time you request a document from the server. This is even if you're reloading the same page, and for every image on the page (if they come from a protected directory). As you can imagine, this slows things down a little. The amount that it slows things down is proportional to the size of the password file, because Apache must open up that file and go down the list of users until it gets to your name. And it has to do this every time a page is loaded. |
| A consequence of this is that there's a limit to how many users you can put in one password file. I don't exactly know what that limit is, but I've experienced problems when I've put more than about 1,500 users in one file. People are denied access, even though you know that they have a valid username and password. It appears that what's happening is that it just takes too long to look up the password, and in the meantime, access is denied. |
Managing Your Password Files with Perl |
| This may seem a little random, but it looked like a good time to throw this in. There are two sets of Perl modules available for managing your password files and group files with Perl. | The first one, which is probably the recommended one, is the HTTPD-User-Manage package, which you can obtain from CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/HTTPD/), allows you to manage a variety of authentication files on a variety of web servers. It is extremely full-featured and lets you do all the sorts of things that you expect to be able to do. These modules were written by Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern. |
| The other set of modules I really only mention as shameless self-promotion. Apache::Htpasswd, by Kevin Meltzer, and Apache::Htgroup, by me, provide a simpler interface to managing password and group files specifically for Apache. These modules are also available on CPAN. | What Other Neat Stuff Can I Do?
Authentication by username and password is only part of the story. Frequently you want to let people in based on something other than who they are. Something such as where they are coming from. |
| The allow and deny directives let you allow and deny access based on the host name, or host address, of the machine requesting a document. The directive goes hand-in-hand with these is the order directive, which tells Apache in which order to apply the filters. | The usage of these directives is:
allow from address
where address is an IP address (or a partial IP address) or a fully qualified domain name (or a partial domain name).
For example, if you have someone spamming your message board, and you want to keep them out, you could do the following:
deny from 205.252.46.165
|
Visitors coming from that address will not be able to see the content behind this directive. If, instead, you have a machine name, rather than an IP address, you can use that:
deny from dc.numbersusa.com
And, if you'd like to block access from an entire domain, you can specify just part of an address or domain name:
deny from 192.101.205
deny from cyberthugs.com
deny from ke
| Using order will let you be sure that you are actually restricting things to the group that you want to let in, by combining a deny and an allow directive:
order deny, allow
deny from all
allow from dev.rcbowen.com
Listing just the allow directive would not do what you want, because it will let folks from that host in, in addition to letting everyone in. What you want is to let only those folks in.
|
More Information
You should also read the documentation for mod_auth (http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_auth.html), which contains some more information about how this all works. And the FAQ on the Apache site has some good stuff about authentication, starting at http://www.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ.html#dnsauth. Originally from http://apachetoday.com/ |
