How to automate generation of htpasswd from command line without typing password?

Question

I am trying to automate creating a password from the command line. I have tried the below but it still keeps asking for the password.

echo "test101" | htpasswd -c ~/temp/password admin

How to generate automate htpasswd from command line without typing password?

Answer 1

Why not just use:

htpasswd -b -c ~/temp/password admin test101

Answer 2

The -b switch should do the trick, but the password will still be visible to other users on the system via the process list (ps etc):

htpasswd -b -c ~/temp/password admin test101

Answer 3

If you don't have htpasswd installed (for example when using nginx) you can generate a password with openssl.

printf "USER:$(openssl passwd -crypt PASSWORD)\n" >> .htpasswd

Answer 4

From the man page of htpasswd we get this:

-i Read the password from stdin without verification (for script usage).

So just acording to your question something like this should work:

echo "test101" | htpasswd -c -i ~/temp/password admin

But the password will be visible in history and process list.

To automate creating a password from the command line i would write the plain password to a file and do something like that:

htpasswd -c -i ~/temp/password admin < ~/temp/pass_plain

Afterwards delete the pass_plain file.

Also make sure the pass_plain file is not readable by anyone else, also if its just there for a few seconds.