This is the Nginx equivalent to basic HTTP authentication on Apache with .htaccess /.htpasswd.

We need a password file where users that should be able to log in are listed with their passwords (in encrypted form). To create such a password file, we can either use Apache's htpasswd tool, or we use the Python script from http://trac.edgewall.org/browser/trunk/contrib/htpasswd.py.

If you want to use Apache's htpasswd command, check if it exists on your system:

which htpasswd

Will return something like this is the htpassed command exists on the system.

/usr/bin/htpasswd

If the command returns without any output, htpasswd does not exist on your system, and you must install it. On Debian/Ubuntu, it's part of the apache2-utils package which we can install as follows:

apt-get -y install apache2-utils

I want to create the password file /var/www/www.example.com/.htpasswd now and store the user john in it (you can give the password file any name you like - it's not necessary to name it .htpasswd; I just named it .htpasswd because that's the way password files are named under Apache):

htpasswd -c /var/www/www.example.com/.htpasswd john

You will be asked for a password for the user john. Please note that the -c switch makes that the file is created from scratch; if it didn't exist before, it will be created; if it existed before, it will be overwritten with a new one, and all users from the old file will be lost! Therefore, if you want to add another user without deleting all existing users, use the htpasswd command without the -c switch:

htpasswd /var/www/www.example.com/.htpasswd jack

The last command adds the user jack to /var/www/www.example.com/.htpasswd so that we now have the users john and jack in it.