How to Protect Your Ruby on Rails Staging App with Password

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.