02-13-2011, 01:59 PM

Hi folks...I'm migrating a web server from Ubuntu to OS X (10.6) and have everything with PHP/MySQL up and running but for some reason the .htaccess file isn't working. Here is what I did:

1. Ran the htpasswd command to create the new user
2. Placed the following .htaccess file in the directory I want to protect:

AuthUserFile /Users/webuser/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Private stuff!"
require valid-user

3. Modified /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and set the AllowOverride command inside of my <Directory> tags to be AuthConfig.

4. Restart with "sudo apachectl restart"


I'm not sure why but the changes don't seem to have any effect. Browsing to the "protected" URL doesn't prompt for any credentials and instead it loads the page up right away. Anybody know why this isn't working?

02-15-2011, 09:58 AM

Why did you place it in the directory you want to protect?

I like to use only one htaccess file per site, always keep it at the root level of the site.

02-15-2011, 01:52 PM

I placed it into a subdirectory because I don't want to protect the entire site with a password. There are other files that I specifically WANT people to be able to access. There are also files that shouldn't be accessible by everyone.

The placement of .htaccess isn't the issue here I can promise you. Once placed in a directory it should prevent access to that and all sub-directories (recursively). The point is that the Apache server on OS X doesn't seem to be responding to my use of .htaccess and I don't know why.

02-24-2011, 11:01 AM

Ok I figured it out. I was getting so frustrated that I eventually just ran this:

$ cd /etc/apache2
$ grep -rni "allowoverride" .

As it turns out, there is a separate config file for your username under /etc/apache2/users. The "AllowOverride" option was set to none there. As soon as I changed this to All and restarted apache everything is working just fine!