GoDaddy Password Protect Home Directory

Problem:

GoDaddy makes it simple to password protect a directory.  You just go to their file manager, click on a directory, click on Permissions, fill out a user and password and you’re done.  Bad thing is that you can’t password protect anything in the public root folder.

Solution:

Easiest solution is to password protect a subdirectory, open .htaccess, copy the code there and paste it into  your .htaccess in the root public folder and then wait a few hours.  Seriously, just wait.  I followed these steps and didn’t wait, got worried it wasn’t working and undid everything.  a few hours later I ran into this post:  http://www.besthostratings.com/articles/http-auth-php-cgi.html

With that post I felt that I could hackily get the authenticated username and password and then use PHP to determine whether the username/password is correct or not.  Then I could show or not show what I needed.  After all, this was only temporary until the client’s site went live.  I soon found out however that the first solution worked this time.  Go figure.