Question

I’ve finished a first website based on django and I’m ready to deploy on a liveserver. However, I don’t want this site to be visible to the public for now while tweaking and testing.

On PHP sites I always used basic http authentication via .htaccess to make last changes. This is a two liner which denies access for the whole site.

Ideally I want to run a environment like this:

• static.mydomain.com (served by apache2 for static files)
• mydomain.com (served by apache2 with mod_wsgi latest stable release -> available for public)
• dev.mydomain.com (served by apache2 with mod_wsgi dev/testing -> not available for public (basic authentication))

Can this be done with django/apache2/mod_wsgi?

Answer 1

You could setup basic auth for your virtual host dev.mydomain.com. Look at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_auth_basic.html and http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/name-based.html for more details

EDIT: Your virtual host config will look somthing like:

<VirtualHost *:80>

    ServerName mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /srv/www/wsgi

    <Directory /srv/www/wsgi>
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    WSGIScriptAlias / /srv/www/wsgi/app.wsgi

</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>

    ServerName dev.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /srv/www/wsgi-dev

    <Directory /srv/www/wsgi-dev>
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    WSGIScriptAlias / /srv/www/wsgi-dev/app.wsgi

    <Location />
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Restricted Files"
        AuthUserFile /usr/local/apache/passwd/passwords
        Require valid-user
    </Location>

</VirtualHost>