Get username of login

Question

Is it possible to get the username of someone who has succesfully authenticated through the htpasswd process and put that in a session variable?

User: mave Pass: mave123

Successful login: write 'mave' to session?

Answer 1

.htaccess cannot create or populate PHP session but you can get:

$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']

value in your PHP code and store in session.

Answer 2

You can try $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'], but I do not know if this works with htaccess, since it's not triggered by PHP.

Answer 3

As other users already answered, you can use the $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] to reference the user. But, it might fail if PHP is running in CGI mode. To set teh User/Pass server variables in CGI mode; add the following in you authorization directory:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule .* - [E=REMOTE_USER:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]
</IfModule>

Now, from PHP, you can use:

if( preg_match('/Basics+(.*)$/i', $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'], $matches) ) {
    list($name, $password) = explode(':', base64_decode($matches[1]));
    $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] = strip_tags($name);
    $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] = strip_tags($password);
}