nginx and auth_basic

Question

I am trying to get basic authentication working with nginx in Ubuntu Jaunty. In nginx.conf, I added these two lines under the server context:

server {
   ..         


        

Answer 1

Another gotcha I ran into on bash. Instead of entering my password via prompt I used the -b option of htpasswd to enter the password in-line.

$ htpasswd -nb admin test123$secure

I couldn't understand why my I kept on running into password mismatch errors, trying different encryption algorithms. I verified with curl that it worked:

$ curl -u admin:test123$secure https://example.com

Finally, the problem reveiled itself through echo

$ echo test123$secure
test123

I made the mistake of using a dolar sign ($) in bash which was interpreted as an empty variable, thus omitting everything else. This can be avoided by dropping the -b option and just using the prompt to enter the password.