HTTP Basic Authentication - Password Restrict an Entire Site (Nginx)

Introduction

Sometimes you need a quick and straightforward way to “lock down” an entire site, making it inaccessible to the general public.

This might be useful if you’re remotely developing a site on a live/public server and only want it accessible to yourself and collaborators. Or maybe you’re sharing a “work in progress” site with a client on a live/public server for them to approve before you go live with changes.

A common way to do this is using HTTP Basic Authentication. With HTTP auth in place, any visitors to your site will be presented with a simple browser popup asking for some login credentials.

In this note set, I’ll demonstrate how to configure HTTP basic auth on an Ubuntu web server running Nginx.

Step 1 - Generate credentials

Step 1 is to install a set of tools called apache2-utils that will allow us to generate HTTP Basic Auth encrypted passwords:

To to this, first update your server’s package manager:

> apt update

Then install apache2-utils:

> apt install apache2-utils

Next, generate a HTTP Basic Auth user with the following command, where admin is whatever user name you’d like:

> htpasswd -c /etc/apache2/.htpasswd admin

This should prompt with a password which you can come up with.

You can confirm your user was created by viewing the contents of /etc/apache2/.htpasswd:

> cat /etc/apache2/.htpasswd
e2:$apr1$HfQZ/baS$zDBMXmTpv8R5Qx2oRU/x4/

Step 2 - Configure

Next, you’ll need to edit the configuration block for the site you’re enabling auth for.

On a Nginx-based server, these configs are found in text files in /etc/nginx/sites-available/, which are then linked to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/.

Within your sites config block, you’ll need to add the following two lines:

auth_basic "Admin Only";
auth_basic_user_file /etc/apache2/.htpasswd;

As an example...

• I’m restricting a site that’s served via the domain demo.codewithsusan.com.
• To config this site, I have a config file at /etc/nginx/sites-available/demo with the config block shown below (note the presence of the two auth_basic lines).
• The config file /etc/nginx/sites-available/demo is symbolically linked to /etc/nginx/sites-available/demo, which makes Nginx register this as an active site on the server.

server {

    auth_basic "Admin Only";
    auth_basic_user_file /etc/apache2/.htpasswd;

    listen 80;
    server_name demo.codewithsusan.com;
    root /var/www/demo;

    index.php index.html;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Step 3 - Restart & Test

When you’ve finished with the above configs, you need to restart your server via the command systemctl restart nginx to make the changes take effect.

To test it works, attempt to visit your site. You should be prompted for a username/password to continue.

Reference

Nginx Docs: Restricting Access with HTTP Basic Authentication