Monday, May 10, 2010

How to Password Protect a Folder or some Files on the web

Placing files .htaccess and .htpasswd into the directory you wish to protect is apparently a good way to put some password protection on folders on the web. So if you want someone to type in a password before they can access a web page, these .ht files are what you would use. There is a good explanation of how you do this here... http://davidwalsh.name/password-protect-directory-using-htaccess - Dave also has a nice tool to let you MD5 encrypt the password too!

Well, I tried it and I got a '500 internal server error' on the page when I tried to access it. After some head scratching I found this post which reminded me that sometimes the presence of non Unix line breaks can cause problems in files like this: http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/6238.

Rather than immediate reach for BBEdit, I found a nice article explaining how to ensure Dreamweaver uses Unix Line Breaks...
http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Dreamweaver/9.0/help.html?content=WSc78c5058ca073340dcda9110b1f693f21-7bdd.html - I don't know why you'd want it any other way!

So, I'm now happy that I have a password protected web page for one of my customers!

1 comment:

suvatha said...
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