I am trying to password protect a directory on my Nginx powered site that contains things like phpMyAdmin, MemcacheMyAdmin, and more admin utilities.
This directory is placed in the root of my site at:
domain.com/control/
The absolute path on my server is at:
/home/deployer/sites/domain.com/control/
I created a .htpasswd file in the directory by using this command:
htpasswd -c /home/deployer/sites/domain.com/control/.htpasswd admin
The file is present, owned by "root" user and is 0644 permissions.
In the .conf file for this domain within Nginx I use the following location block to require authentication.
location /control {
auth_basic "Restricted Area: Control";
auth_basic_user_file /home/deployer/sites/domain.com/control/.htpasswd;
}
When going to the password protected directory I'm prompted for a username and password. I enter my previously created credentials and I'm then presented with an error 403 forbidden page.
Access logs show me that I'm hitting the login prompt and then logging in as the "admin" user:
64.123.456.225 - - [12/May/2013:17:30:48 +0000] "GET /control HTTP/1.1" 401 597 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31"
64.123.456.225 - admin [12/May/2013:17:30:48 +0000] "GET /control HTTP/1.1" 301 185 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31"
64.123.456.225 - admin [12/May/2013:17:30:59 +0000] "GET /control/memcache/ HTTP/1.1" 403 199 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31"
The error logs show the following:
2013/05/12 17:31:01 [error] 30462#0: *1 directory index of "/home/deployer/sites/domain.com/control/memcache/" is forbidden, client: 64.123.456.225, server: domain.com, request: "GET /control/memcache/ HTTP/1.1", host: "domain.com"
2013/05/12 17:31:09 [error] 30462#0: *1 directory index of "/home/deployer/sites/domain.com/control/memcache/" is forbidden, client: 64.123.456.225, server: domain.com, request: "GET /control/memcache/ HTTP/1.1", host: "domain.com"
If I remove the Auth block for the Nginx .conf for that site I can then access the page like normal.
Thanks for any help!
This can be caused by permissions or a non-existent or invalid directory index directive.
Permissions: If www is owned by nginx but /var is owned by root, then www will inherit the permissions of var, thus denying access.
Index Directive: If the directory index is set to an unavailable file, then nginx will throw a 403. In this case, I'm guessing it's defaulting to index.htm instead of index.php.
Best of luckerage!