Apache access control the Agaric way

Clients don't like their test site competing with their live, production site for Google results. Therefore, we have put our entire set of test sites behind a pop-up requiring basic Apache authentication.

For ongoing maintenance — adding new people to access the test environment behind the authorization wall — the operative command is:

sudo htpasswd /etc/apache2/passwd/passwords sam

Where sam is replaced with whatever username you want the next user added to have.

The setup instructions follow below.

Resolution

Roughly following the instructions here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/auth.html

sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/passwd

sudo htpasswd -c /etc/apache2/passwd/passwords dan
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user dan

sudo htpasswd /etc/apache2/passwd/passwords benjamin
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user benjamin

sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

<Directory /sites>
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "Agaric Test Server"
  AuthBasicProvider file
  AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/passwd/passwords
  Require valid-user
</Directory>

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

You may also find your configuration files in the sites-enabled directory (symlinked from sites-available).

That works for all subdirectories of /sites thankfully