Question

Notice, this is a remote server, I don’t have access to it, only to the FTP. I want to do this using purely PHP, not .htaccess. Is there a way similar to .net, where you put the web.config file and you set who can access it and their password?

Answer 1

I’d say the equivalent of that kind of functionnality from web.config on Apache is with .htaccess files : PHP is used to generate pages, but if you are trying to work at the directory level, the check has to come before PHP is even called.

In your PHP scripts, you can access the data of HTTP Authentication ; see $_SERVER, especially PHP_AUTH_USER and PHP_AUTH_PW ; but the protection will be at the file’s level, and not directory — and, obviously, it will be enforced only for PHP files (not images in a subdirectory, for instance).

For more informations, you can have a look at, for instance : HTTP Basic and Digest authentication with PHP

The right way to do this for an entire directory is definitly with .htpasswd / .htaccess files (or directly in the Apache’s configuration file).