How to set up authentication for your website with nginx

You can set up basic authentication with nginx to restrict access to your website:

Install httpd-tools package first:

sudo yum install httpd-tools

If you are on Ubuntu install that package:

sudo apt-get install apache2-utils

Add to your nginx config:

server {
    ...
    auth_basic "closed site";
    auth_basic_user_file conf/htpasswd;
}

Go to /etc/nginx and create folder conf:

cd /etc/nginx
sudo mkdir conf

Then you need to generate file htpasswd that contains authentication data:

sudo htpasswd -c htpasswd admin