PHP HTTP Basic Auth using Form - php

Question

How can I use HTTP basic Authentication and have the user submit their Username and Password in a HTML form and have it Authenticate using HTTP Basic Authentication.
I heard that Internet Explorer no longer supports the use of http://user:password#website.com no more so I don't know the best way to approach this.
Use of PHP and javascript and HTML is OK. I don't want to use PERL and I perfer no big javascript libs.
If you don't think HTTP Basic Auth. is the best way, please recommend something easy and simple to do. It will only be a login site for 5-6 people. No need to complicate it.

Answer 1

jQuery library has ajax function which has "password" and "user" parameter for Authentication. When user click login you can get value of login and password and passed to $.ajax function.
$('#submit').click(function() {
$.ajax({
url: 'authenticated.php',
username: $('#login').val(),
password: $('#passwd').val(),
success: function(data) {
//do something with data from the server
}
});
return false;
});

Answer 2

IMHO, the whole point of using HTTP authentication is being able to delegate authentication tasks:
The web server takes care of denying unauthorized access to protected resources
The browser takes care of asking for username and password when required
So you have a working system with minimum effort.
Now, if you use an HTML form to ask for credentials, the server will know who you are but the browser won't: it'll ask for credentials as soon as it finds the WWW-Authenticate response header and the 401 status code. For this to work, the browser has to send an Authorization request header on every HTTP request; however, your form cannot instruct the browser to send the appropriate HTTP header.
Of course, you can write your own server-side authentication code in PHP, configure the server to parse static files through it and omit 401 and WWW-Authenticate as soon as you get valid credentials (which then need to be stored somewhere else, e.g., a PHP session). But then you've lost all the advantages of HTTP authentication: at this point, a custom login handler with PHP sessions will be a much easier solution.
To sum up:
If you need simplicity, forget about HTML forms
If you need HTML forms, write your own code

Answer 3

If i understand you correctly you need to use .htpasswd with .htaccess: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/password/

Answer 4

How can I use HTTP basic Authentication and have the user submit their Username and Password in a HTML form
No way.
please recommend something easy and simple to do.
sessions, cookies.
google for PHP auth tutorial and get over 9000 articles
oh well, one of them
<?
if (isset($_POST['auth_name'])) {
$name=mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['auth_name']);
$pass=mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['auth_pass']);
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE name='$name' AND pass='$pass'";
$res = mysql_query($query) or trigger_error(mysql_error().$query);
if ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) {
session_start();
$_SESSION['user_id'] = $row['id'];
$_SESSION['ip'] = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
}
header("Location: http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
exit;
}
if (isset($_GET['action']) AND $_GET['action']=="logout") {
session_start();
session_destroy();
header("Location: http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']."/");
exit;
}
if (isset($_REQUEST[session_name()])) session_start();
if (isset($_SESSION['user_id']) AND $_SESSION['ip'] == $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) return;
else {
include 'your design here.php';
?>
<form method="POST">
<input type="text" name="auth_name"><br>
<input type="password" name="auth_pass"><br>
<input type="submit"><br>
</form>
<?
}
exit;
?>
intended to be put into file and called as require '/path/auth.php'; at the top of your scripts