My Web Experiences » Apache

Protect web pages with username/password

Rene — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:59:37 +0000

If there some web pages you want to protect with username/password, all you have to do is to create a file called .htaccess under the directory to protect with the following lines:

AuthUserFile /path/to/htpasswd/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Restricted Directory"
AuthType Basic
require valid-user

Replace /path/to/htpasswd/ with the .htpasswd path.
Replace Restricted Directory with the text you want as title of the prompt window.

Then you have to create the .htpasswd file using the following command:

htpasswd -c .htpasswd user_name

Execute it under the directory to protect or add the full path to .httpasswd and replace user_name by the username you want to use, you will be asked to enter the password and the file will be created.

Notes: This instruction are for linux/unix systems using apache web server, the dot means hidden files on linux.

Configure Apache to serve PERL pages ( Ubuntu )

Rene — Fri, 30 May 2008 23:59:17 +0000

I just reinstalled my ubuntu distribution, and have to configure apache to serve perl pages outside of the cgi-bin directory, after a little bit of googling i found the solution.

You have to edit the /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and add to it the following lines.

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
Options +ExecCGI
Options +ExecCGI

Stop apache showing incomplete urls

Rene — Fri, 23 May 2008 03:51:20 +0000

Apache was showing files even if i didn’t put the extension on the url, that behavior was messing with a mod rewrite rule i was working on. To solve this we just add the line below to the .htaccess file and that’s it apache will stop showing incomplete urls

Options -MultiViews

Force download in apache

Rene — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:31:04 +0000

if you want to force certain kind of files to pop up the save as dialog box, you have to add the AddType directive with the value application/octet-stream to the .htaccess file like this:

AddType application/octet-stream .csv
AddType application/octet-stream .xls
AddType application/octet-stream .doc
AddType application/octet-stream .avi
AddType application/octet-stream .mpg
AddType application/octet-stream .mov
AddType application/octet-stream .pdf

and that’s all, now everything works fine

Configure ubuntu to use mod_rewrite

Rene — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:58:40 +0000

To enable mod_rewrite on Ubuntu is pretty easy what we have to do is, first we enable the apache module for mod rewrite with this line.

sudo a2enmod rewrite

After that we have to edit the file /etc/apache2/sites-avalible/default, then we look for this:

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
# This directive allows us to have apache2′s default start page
# in /apache2-default/, but still have / go to the right place
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/

And then we replace “AllowOverride None” by “AllowOverride All”, this line tells apache to read the .htaccess file, that is the file where we will put our rewrite rules.

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
# This directive allows us to have apache2′s default start page
# in /apache2-default/, but still have / go to the right place
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/

finally we just reload apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

now we have pretty urls for our sites. :)