How To Set up Password Authentication on a Site with MAMP Pro

Recently I needed to debug an issue that was happening on a staging site that is protected by basic authentication. To try and recreate the issue I needed to password protect my local development site in the same way.

I’m using MAMP Pro for my local sites and as I couldn’t find a post about setting up basic auth on MAMP Pro, I thought I’d best document it – even just for myself googling in the future.

Create the Password

To create the username and password file we can use the htpasswd tool that comes installed on a Mac by default.

Choose where you want to store the password file and make sure the directory exists:

mkdir /Users/igp/web

Then run the htpasswd command using the -c argument to create the file, passing the username:

htpasswd -c /Users/igp/web/.htpasswd iain

You will be asked to supply a password and then confirm it. That’s it. Now we need to tell MAMP Pro to use it for a site.

Configuring MAMP Pro

I just wanted to password protect one of my sites in MAMP, so it needs to be set up as a host. Select the host and click the Apache tab and you should see a text box for ‘Additional parameters for <VirtualHost> directive:`. I’m using MAMP Pro 4.4.1 so things might vary on your version.

In that box add the following, making sure you change the path of ‘AuthUserFile’ to match your path:

<Location />
    Deny from all
    AuthUserFile /Users/igp/web/.htpasswd
    AuthName "Restricted Area"
    AuthType Basic
    Satisfy Any
    require valid-user
</Location>

Save the settings and get MAMP to restart the servers.

And that’s it! The next time you access the site it will ask you for a username and password before you can access it.