Apache access control the Agaric way

[Note, this is outdated, now using Kerberos.]

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