Htaccess is a system for handling access control to your pages. It
works by placing an .htaccess file in a directory, which
contains the access control lists for that directory. It is possible
to get fine grained security and to configure exactly who can view
which pages. The .htaccess support module must be
enabled for htaccess to work.
It is possible to distinguish users either by the IP address or
domain name of their computer or by letting them authenticate with a
user name and password. The user name and password is by default
compared via an authentication module. That usually means that
users are authenticated by the operating systems authentication
system.
If you want to have password protected pages usable by users that
are not handled by the current Authentication module you can create
your own database of users by creating .htpasswd and
.htgroup files.
htaccess is a standard supported by many web servers. The access
control you have built with htaccess should therefore be portable to
other web servers.
