password protect a site

[chuender]

Hi,

I will be moving a site from my local machine to my host but need to password protect it to only allow my beta testers to see it. I was thinking of putting some sort of permission on the index.php file to force users to enter username/password. Is this possible? What is the easiest way to accomplish this?

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Chuender

[mikell]

google ".htaccess" if you're using apache, which i assume you are.

[Horizon88]

.htaccess is excellent for just a few users, but if you get to be more than a few dozen users it's a huge pain to edit .htaccess files manually to add new users. You could also bang out a quick php authentication using a database of some sort to store user credentials then a session and login form for validation.

You'd basically put an if check at the top of every page, to see if the session variable for validated users is set, and if it's not, redirect them to the login page. The login page processes the form against the database and sets the session variable accordingly.

But yeah, for just a few users, .htaccess is the way to go.

[bradgrafelman]

Horizon88 wrote:

but if you get to be more than a few dozen users it's a huge pain to edit .htaccess files manually to add new users

If you're talking about having to edit the .htpasswd file, then yes, that can be tedious if you don't use automation. That's why you could have the .htaccess file use a MySQL DB instead.