PHP & .htaccess

[Janus13]

This question could be asked in two different places on the forum so I'm going to post it in both - mods, I hope that's ok.

I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to get PHP and Apache .htaccess to work together to achieve a single sign on.  I have a directory security program I have written to protect directories on apache servers so it's more flexible than just having to manually create password files and us .htaccess.  At the moment I have to have it display two different login boxes. The first one is a php page that has a login form, then compares the form information to a mysql database for authentication.  If successful then it sends the user to the protected directory, and if that directory has a .htaccess file and rule setup for a password file it prompts again for user credentials.  What I want to do is figure out a way to pass the php login information to Apache so it will accept that as login credentials and not prompt the second time.  Is this possible?

Thanks for any help! I can't imagine I'm the first to want to do this, so hopefully someone has some ideas.

[HuggieBear]

I don't think you are the first, and it can be done the other way around, .htaccess login info can be sent to a php page by using the $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] and $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] variables.  I'm not sure about the other way though, passing values from php to .htaccess, maybe it's just a case of setting the values of those variables, so when apache looks for them, they're valid.

I'll test it.

Regards
Huggie

[size=8pt][color=red][b]Note:[/b][/color] That didn't work :([/size]

[Janus13]

Ok so to get it to work then you'd have be able to overwrite the the globals for username and password, which as far as I can tell aren't possible.  So is there no way to do a SSO (Single Sign On) for Apache like you can for IIS?? I suppose you'd have to do it without .htaccess, but that's just not as secure, and for what I code for people they don't always know PHP so they can't rely on php security pages..