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django.htaccesspassengerdreamhost

PassengerEnabled Off and Password Protect Directory using .htaccess with Django on Dreamhost

I have a website built using Django on Dreamhost deployed successfully with Passenger and Apache. I have a set of static HTML pages that is being served in a remapped sub-directory called /demo/. By adding a .htaccess file to the /demo/ directory with this line:

PassengerEnabled off

I was able to bypass Django and serve the static pages in the /demo/ directory. I would like to add password protection to the /demo/ pages without editing the Django python files, but was unable to do so by adding the following lines to the .htaccess file (both above and below the PassengerEnabled off line:

AuthUserFile /public/demo/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Private Demo Area"
AuthType Basic
require valid-user

I am not forced to use the .htaccess file approach and was wondering how do I configure the static file directory to not be processed by Django but also be password protected? Thanks!

Solution

  • I found a solution which involved creating a subdomain instead of trying to serve the static files through Django and Passenger through a remapped sub-directory. Here is what I did:

    • Created subdomain demo.domain.com in dreamhost web panel

    • Added the .htaccess file to the root directory of the subdomain:

      AuthUserFile /public/demo/.htpasswd AuthGroupFile /dev/null AuthName "Private Demo Area" AuthType Basic require valid-user

    That did the trick, but the domain for my demo is now demo.domain.com instead of domain.com/demo/. I am ok with this trade off and this was the only solution I could find on dreamhost shared hosting.