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up vote 2 down vote favorite

this is what I want to be able to script with a password in variable $pass.

htdigest -c /etc/apache2/pw/$user $user $user

At the moment it asks me to manually enter a password, this is not going to be possible since it will be an automated setup by a PHP script. Could someone please show me how to script this? Or an equivalent scriptable function? Thanks :)

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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/645659/how-do-you-htdigest-400-user-accounts

The easiest method, based on one of the suggestions in the top-voted answer, is probably this:

(echo -n "$user:$realm:" && echo -n "$user:$realm:$password" | md5sum | awk '{print $1}' ) >> /etc/apache2/pw/$user

I've used md5sum from GNU coreutils and awk rather than just md5 because it's what i have installed on my system and I couldn't be bothered finding out which package has /usr/bin/md5 - you could also use sha512sum or other hashing program.

e.g. if user=foo, realm=bar, and password=baz then the command above will produce:

foo:bar:5bf2a4095f681d1c674655a55af66c5a

htdigest doesn't do anything magical or even unusual - it just outputs the user, realm, and password in the right format...as the command above does.

Deleting the digest for a given user:realm instead of just adding one, can easily be done with sed. Updating/changing the digest for a user:realm can also be done with sed in combination with the method above to generate the digest line. e.g.

DIGESTLINE=$(echo -n "$user:$realm:" && echo -n "$user:$realm:$password" | md5sum | awk '{print $1}')

sed -i -e "/^$user:$realm:/ c$DIGESTLINE" /etc/apache2/pw/$user
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awesome :P had some issues when the file didn't already exist, so i create the file before running this :o – King Aug 21 '12 at 11:27
up vote 0 down vote

Check the 'proc_open' function in PHP http://fr.php.net/manual/en/function.proc-open.php

You can run htdigest with your option, then send in the pipes the new password.

You can probably found/create a PHP function which do the htdigest job. It should be easier thant use proc_open...

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it's much more complex than just making a new apache user :p using php is not an option – King Aug 21 '12 at 11:26

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