There are situations when you are in need of password protection for staging apps. For example, you need to show something only to your client. In this quick tutorial, I will show you how to password protect your application in Nginx using htpasswd
Step 1
Generate the htpasswd file. I assume your application is placed in its home folder.
$ htpasswd -c /home/PROJECT_NAME/htpasswd PROJECT_NAME
The file you generated will store the user login (PROJECT_NAME in our case) and a hash of the password, so it's not retrievable.
If you need to reset the password, you can run the command again with the existing file:
$ htpasswd /home/PROJECT_NAME/htpasswd PROJECT_NAME
Note that the -c switch is no longer used.
Step 2
Configure Nginx to use the htpasswd file.
Here's an exemplary Nginx configuration:
server {
…
location / {
auth_basic "Restricted";
auth_basic_user_file /home/PROJECT_NAME/htpasswd;
…
}
}
Step 3
Once you have made changes to the Nginx configuration, you need to reload it. The command you need to run is as follows:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload
Type in the PROJECT_NAME as your username and the password you configured and you will be let in.
