Password protecting a directory and all of it's subfolders using .htaccess

Odyss3us picture Odyss3us · Mar 8, 2011 · Viewed 90.9k times · Source

I am trying to password protect a subdomain and all of it's subdirectories and files, but my knowledge on the matter is very limited, how can I go about doing that?

Answer

Mahesh picture Mahesh · Mar 8, 2011

It's a simple two step process

In your .htaccess put

AuthType Basic
AuthName "restricted area"
AuthUserFile /path/to/the/directory/you/are/protecting/.htpasswd
require valid-user

use http://www.htaccesstools.com/htpasswd-generator/ or command line to generate password and put it in the .htpasswd

Note 1: If you are using cPanel you should configure in the security section "Password Protect Directories"

EDIT: If this didn't work then propably you need to do a AllowOverride All to the directory of the .htaccess (or atleast to previous ones) in http.conf followed by a apache restart

<Directory /path/to/the/directory/of/htaccess>
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
      AllowOverride All
</Directory>