Securing PHP Files using HTTP Authentication By Peter McNulty : 15-01-2005.

It is quite common to have the need to password protect a certain file or a set of files, in order to prevent unauthorized access to those files. There are many different alternatives on how to do this including, sessions, cookies, JavaScript and HTTP authentication. The latter of these is what we are going to concentrate on in this article.

Usually this form of authentication is called Apache HTTP Authentication as it is only available for Apache based web server. To be honest, that is a lie as it is also possible with Microsoft's IIS web server, however, is much more difficult to implement and requires many configuration changes in order for it to run successfully. Hence, we will only focus on getting this working under Apache.Note:
For those of you that would like to break down the "mystique" of all this talk on HTTPAuth and CGIAuth, be sure to check this article out!