Can I password-protect directories

[whumann]

I registered for free icr38.net hosting and was wondering if I can limit access to certain folders to authorized people, e.g. using .htaccess. If it is possible, what's the path to be used for AuthUserFile?

Wolfram

[whumann]

Allright, answered half of my question myself: Access control using .htaccess is possible. If I place a .htaccess-file in a directory I do get asked for login and password if I try to access this from the web. However, when I enter login and pass, I always get an Error 500 (Internal Server Error). That's no surprise because the "AuthUserFile" line in .htaccess needs an absolute path to the file containing logins and passwords so that a line like this

AuthUserFile htdocs/.htusers   # this does NOT work

needs to fail. So the remaining question is:
What's the absolute path from the server's root to the root of my web-space?

Any help or reply much appreciated!
Wolfram

[Andrew]

To get your definitive path or absolute server path, upload this in a file called path.php into the directory you're looking to protect...

<?php
echo getcwd();
?>

Then view it in your browser by going to it such as yoursite.example.com/path.php... it should display something like /home/vol#/example.com/user_123456/htdocs/path.php and everything before the path.php bit is your path.

From there use the following format for your .htaccess adjusting where necessary...

Code:

AuthUserFile /home/vol#/example.com/user_123456/htdocs/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Private Area"
AuthType Basic
<Limit GET POST>
require valid-user
</Limit>

Then upload .htpasswd into your HTDOCS folder using a format similar to this in which the username is chicken and the password is cheese which is encoded using the encoder linked here: http://home.flash.net/cgi-bin/pw.pl

Code:

chicken:XixxrFOdloHMc

For each user simply add a new entry below the previous one.