nginx: auth_basic and php

Question

i want to protect a folder of my website with a password using auth_basic. This folder contains php-scripts which should be executed if they are requested.

I tried the following:

location /admin {
  auth_basic    "Admin-Section";
  auth_basic_user_file /myfolder/.htpasswd;
 }

 location ~ ^/admin/.*\.php$ {
  auth_basic    "Admin-Section";
  auth_basic_user_file /myfolder/.htpasswd;
  fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
  fastcgi_index index.php;
  fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
  include   fastcgi_params;
 }

I will be asked for username/password when requesting the php-scripts in that admin-folder, but the php-scripts will always be downloaded instead of executed via fastcgi.

What am i doing wrong?

EDIT: On my local machine everything works fine with this configuration. o0
EDIT: BTW, php is working outside the admin-folder with the same fastcgi-options.
EDIT: OMG! The site's config was stored at /etc/nginx/sites-available/mysite and /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ contained a symlink to the mysite-file. Since some time changing the mysite-file had no effect. E.g. changing all locations to "deny all" had no effect. The files were sent without a problem.
So i removed the symlink and restarted the server. Then i created the symlink again, restarted the server and everything works as expected. Can someone explain the odd behaviour?

Gest regards,
Biggie

Answer 1

With this configuration, nginx will only match one of the two blocks - the one with the highest precedence.

The solution is to combine the PHP block into the AUTH block. This is the approach recommended by the nginx author himself, Igor Sysoev.

location /admin/ {
  auth_basic    "Admin-Section";
  auth_basic_user_file /myfolder/.htpasswd;
  location ~ \.php$ {
   fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
   fastcgi_index index.php;
   fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
   include       fastcgi_params;
  }
}

location ~ \.php$ {
  fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
  fastcgi_index index.php;
  fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
  include       fastcgi_params;
}