Grove

How To Create Your Own Username and Password

How To Setup A Group Username and Password

Grove

Creating Your Own Username and Passwords

At your discretion, you may assign individual usernames associated with a unique password.

As a security measure, it is important not to place this file in the public_html directory or its subdirectories. The path to your file mypassfile generally should be located in the home directory of your account.

Creating password files

To generate the password file you need to run the password encryption program htpasswd. For example, if you wanted to create the file mypass containing the name linda to be associated with the password computerclassmate, you would type the following:

You will be prompted to enter the password for aperson. You would enter: 

	computerclassmate

and then repeat it for verification.

After creating the file, make sure it's readable by others:

Note: The -c is used only to create the mypassfile file; you may only create one username associated with a password at each processing of htpasswd.

Password information to include in the .htaccess file

The .htaccess file will need password file information.  In addition, authorization control needs to be specified. Use the following lines in your .htaccess file to restrict access to you web pages to names in your mypassfile that have an associated password. In this example, the owner of the class account c4321brw for course bus4321 will restrict access to his web pages to allow only the authorized usernames with the required password. The information for validating the username and password is in the file mypassfile in the c4321brw home directory.

Password access control adding group information

If you are interested in setting up group associations, you need to create an additional file, allmygroupfile, to hold your group names and their associated usernames. No information in the allmygroupfile is encrypted. Again for security reasons, it is important not to place this file in the public_html directory or its subdirectories. The path to your file allmygroupfile generally would be located in your home directory of your account.

To generate the groupfile, webgroups, use

After creating the file, make sure it's readable:

In the following example, the username for the account is jason. He has created a password file in his home directory named mypassfile using the htpasswd command. In addition he has created a file, webgroups, associated with usernames who have encrypted passwords contained in mypassfile. The AuthName is Computer classes. The group that will have access to jason's web pages are groups cis5331 and group2.

Note: By using these last two examples, someone trying to browse jason's web pages would have the username roy, tony nancy bearor dog and have the correct associated password.

AuthName "Computer classes"

AuthName strings MUST be quoted in .htaccess if they contain blank characters (like spaces). For example, if you use an AuthName directive like this: 

       	AuthName This and That
	you will need to change it to: 
 	AuthName "This and That"

If you are interested in further information on security on the apache web server refer to apache.org.