Have you ever set up a web site and wanted to protect one of its folders so that it's restricted to people who know a password?

If you're technically inclined the process isn't a big deal, but if you aren't then it can be rather intimidating because of the esoteric Unix commands and files that you have to create and apply correctly and appropriately.

It ought to be easier!

And now, at CSUN, it is :-)


I wrote a little PHP script that does this for people. As a CSUN web site owner, you log in and the script fetches a list of the folders on your web site. If you don't have a public_html folder in your web site yet, then it creates one for you.

In your list of folders, you simply click on the ones you want to protect and then either choose "All CSUN" or supply a list of individual CSUN users who are to be allowed in the folder.

Just click folder names to change or remove protection. The list of folders shows those with individual password protections as well as those that are protected because their ancestor folders are set that way.

Overall, prettly slick if I do say so myself. No more professors manually dealing with telnet or FTP to create .htaccess files that use calls to LDAP servers. All this is done with a couple of clicks now as my PHP scripts communicate with the web server via FTP to move copies of .htaccess files around and examine them to let people set or modify lists of individuals.

Copyrighted material can now easily be limited to campus access even though it is stored in various faculty web sites.

My boss is happy. That's never a bad thing.