BasicAuthManager is a small web GUI written in Flask for managing HTTP basic authentication. It uses passlib password hashing library to create/update Htpasswd file which can later be used by either NGINX or Apache for enabling basic authentication for desired sites.

The resulting Htpasswd file has sha256_crypt encrypted passwords.

BasicAuthManager requires Python 3.5.x or above.

Install python, virtualenv, supervisor and apache2-utils packages:

# apt-get install python python-virtualenv supervisor apache2-utils

Create a user:

# groupadd bam
# useradd -d /home/bam -g bam

As the new user, clone the repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/NIXKnight/BasicAuthManager.git

Create a python virtual environment and install application requirements:

$ virtualenv ~/venv
$ pip -r install ~/BasicAuthManager/requirements.txt

Create a configuration file ~/BasicAuthManager/config.cfg as follows:

SECRET_KEY = "Random Key String"
ADMIN_USER = "admin"
HTPASSWD_FILE = "/path/to/htpasswd_file"
SMTP_FROM = "from email address"
SMTP_SERVER = "SMTPHOST"
SMTP_TRANSPORT = "STARTTLS"
SMTP_PORT = "587"
SMTP_USERNAME = "from email address"
SMTP_PASSWORD = "password"

Note that you can use either STARTTLS or SSL in SMTP_TRANSPORT. Ensure that you use the proper port in SMTP_PORT.

Create an Htpasswd file (with -B option for bcrypt encryption) having an admin user as in the config.cfg:

$ htpasswd -B -c /path/to/htpasswd_file admin

Create a supervisor configuration file /etc/supervisor/conf.d/BasicAuthManager.conf with following parameters:

user = bam
directory = /home/bam/BasicAuthManager
command = /home/bam/venv/bin/gunicorn BasicAuthManager:app -w 4 -b 127.0.0.1:8000
environment = PRODUCTION=1
redirect_stderr = True
autorestart = True
stdout_logfile = /var/log/supervisor/BasicAuthManager_stdout.log
stderr_logfile = /var/log/supervisor/BasicAuthManager_stderr.log

Create NGINX server block as follows:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name this.bam.local;
  autoindex off;

  location / {
    proxy_set_header X-Forward-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
  }

  location /static {
    alias /home/bam/BasicAuthManager/static/;
  }

  access_log /var/log/nginx/BasicAuthManager-access.log;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/BasicAuthManager-error.log;
}

If you don't want to go through the hassle of manual setup, you can use the Ansible role Ansible-BasicAuthManager for the purpose of setting up BasicAuthManager.

If you want to contribute to BasicAuthManager and make it better, your help is very welcome. Note that I am not a Python/Flask developer.

You could send me a pull request. Just do let me know how does your pull request makes the application better. I will do my best to understand and merge the code.

I wanted to learn bits of how to code a web application. In trying to do so, I wrote BasicAuthManager to fullfil my need because I hate logging in to the server to update htpasswd files everytime I have to create/remove a user.

BasicAuthManager is licensed under MIT License. See LICENSE file.

Saad Ali