Nginx gives an Internal Server Error 500 after I have configured basic auth

Question

I am trying to do basic auth on Nginx. I have version 1.9.3 up and running on Ubuntu 14.04 and it works fine with a simple html file.

Here is the html file:

Answer 1

In my case, I had my auth_basic setup protecting an nginx location that was served by a proxy_pass configuration.

The configured proxy_pass location wasn't returning a successful HTTP200 response, which caused nginx to respond with an Internal Server Error after I had entered the correct username and password.

If you have a similar setup, ensure that the proxy_pass location protected by auth_basic is returning an HTTP200 response after you rule out username/password issues.