HTTP Auth via PHP - PHP_AUTH_USER not set?

php http authentication server-variables
Christian Ivicevic picture Christian Ivicevic · Aug 13, 2011 · Viewed 17.7k times · Source

I tried to implement a small authentication via http and copied this bit of code from the net to check whether this will work properly:

<?php
    if(!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'])) {
        header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="My Realm"');
        header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
        echo 'Text to send if user hits Cancel button';
        exit;
    } else {
        echo "<p>Hello {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']}.</p>";
        echo "<p>You entered {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']} as your password.</p>";
    }
?>

However, my browser always ask for a username and password but never outputs anything until i cancel. Therefore i think that $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] is never set! What might be the problem? I am running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server with Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.7d DAV/2 Server.

Answer

Andreas Wong picture Andreas Wong · Aug 13, 2011

Run phpinfo(). if "Server API" is CGI/FCGI, you can pretty much forget it as there is no sensible way to use HTTP auth from PHP.

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