.htaccess files - How to point to password file

[CrimpJiggler]

I put a .htaccess file in my root directory containing this:

AuthName "Restricted Area" 
AuthType Basic 
AuthUserFile /var/www/.htpasswd 
Require valid-user

and it works, but if I wanna upload this site to a server, the path won't be /var/www, and since I don't yet know what the path will be I'm trying to find out how to point to it with explicitly writing the path. In PHP I could do something like:

$path = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/mysite/.htpasswd';

but I'm new to .htaccess files so I don't know if they have built in variables and functions like that. I tried adding this:

AuthUserFile .htpasswd

but as expected, it looks for a .htpasswd in the current directory which might not be the root directory. I know this from checking the error logs after getting a 500 error.

[requinix]

Apache isn't flexible on the matter, unfortunately.

The AuthUserFile directive sets the name of a textual file containing the list of users and passwords for user authentication. File-path is the path to the user file. If it is not absolute, it is treated as relative to the ServerRoot.