Programmatically building htpasswd

Question

Is there a programmatic way to build htpasswd files, without depending on OS specific functions (i.e. exec(), passthru())?

Answer 1

.httpasswd files are just text files with a specific format depending on the hash function specified. If you are using MD5 they look like this:

foo:$apr1$y1cXxW5l$3vapv2yyCXaYz8zGoXj241 

That's the login, a colon, ,$apr1$, the salt and 1000 times md5 encoded as base64. If you select SHA1 they look like this:

foo:{SHA}BW6v589SIg3i3zaEW47RcMZ+I+M= 

That's the login, a colon, the string {SHA} and the SHA1 hash encoded with base64.

If your language has an implementation of either MD5 or SHA1 and base64 you can just create the file like this:

<?php  $login = 'foo'; $pass = 'pass'; $hash = base64_encode(sha1($pass, true));  $contents = $login . ':{SHA}' . $hash;  file_put_contents('.htpasswd', $contents);  ?> 

Here's more information on the format:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/misc/password_encryptions.html