HTTP Auth via PHP - PHP_AUTH_USER not set?

Question

I tried to implement a small authentication via http and copied this bit of code from the net to check whether this will work properly:

<?php
    if(!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'])) {
        header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="My Realm"');
        header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
        echo 'Text to send if user hits Cancel button';
        exit;
    } else {
        echo "<p>Hello {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']}.</p>";
        echo "<p>You entered {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']} as your password.</p>";
    }
?>

However, my browser always ask for a username and password but never outputs anything until i cancel. Therefore i think that $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] is never set! What might be the problem? I am running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server with Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.7d DAV/2 Server.

Answer 1

For PHP-CGI:

in .htaccess add this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]
</IfModule>

and at the beginning of your script add this:

list($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'], $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']) = explode(':' , base64_decode(substr($_SERVER['HTTP_AUTHORIZATION'], 6)));

Answer 2

Run phpinfo(). if "Server API" is CGI/FCGI, you can pretty much forget it as there is no sensible way to use HTTP auth from PHP.