Question

Does anyone know if it’s possible to use regex capture within Apache’s DirectoryMatch directive? I’d like to do something like the following:

<DirectoryMatch ^/home/www/(.*)>     AuthType Basic     AuthName $1     AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/svn.passwd     Require group $1 admin </DirectoryMatch> 

but so far I’ve had no success.

Specifically, I’m trying to create a group-based HTTP Auth for individual directories/vhosts on a server in Apache 2.0.

For example, Site A, pointing to /home/www/a will be available to all users in group admin and group a, site b at /home/www/b will be available to all users in group admin and group b, etc. I’d like to keep everything based on the directory name so I can easily script adding htpasswd users to the correct groups and automate this as much as possible, but other suggestions for solving the problem are certainly welcome.

Answer 1

You could tackle the problem from a completely different angle: enable the perl module and you can include a little perl script in your httpd.conf. You could then do something like this:

<Perl> my @groups = qw/ foo bar baz /; foreach ( @groups ) {     push @PerlConfig, qq| <Directory /home/www/$_> blah </Directory> |; } </Perl> 

That way, you could even read your groups and other information from a database or by simply globbing /home/www or whatever else tickles your fancy.