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I'm setting up Trac, and want to password protect the login page, as suggested here. I'm on a shared hosting setup, so I can't modify the httpd.conf, I have to use .htacces. How do I restrict just the login page without restricting other pages? The Trac docs suggest:

<Location "/trac/login">
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "Trac"
  AuthUserFile /somewhere/trac.htpasswd
  Require valid-user

But the Location tag is only for httpd.conf, it doesn't work in .htaccess. How can I get the same effect? There's no "login" directory to put a .htaccess file into, it needs to go into the main trac directory.

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2 Answers 2

This is just a guess, but can you place that in a .htaccess file, minus the <Location> and </Location> tags, inside the /trac/login directory?

Also, be sure to have your htpasswd file outside the document root (commonly public_html) otherwise it can be downloaded and cracked.

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It turns out, dreamhost has a page on this very problem. Short answer: there's no good way to do it through apache configuration, so use the TracAccountManager plugin instead.

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