Damn, but that was a long-winded process. I’ve just spent the better part of 4 hours reading and researching why I get (got, its fixed now)\u00a0 404 errors from wp-admin when I enabled .htaccess Authentication (htpasswd) for the wp-admin directory. It only happened with WordPress MU \/ Network config.<\/p>\n
googling for this error ends up with a mountain of irrelevant threads, inconclusive discussion, and unanswered questions.<\/p>\n
WordPress single user 3.1 is not affected by this as there are no ReWrite rules required for the wp-admin. The issue only occurs with MU or Network as it is now called in WP 3.0+ as there is a set of ReWrite rules in the .htaccess file that look like this:<\/p>\n
\nRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
\nRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
\nRewriteRule ^ – [L]
\nRewriteRule ^[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+\/(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $1 [L]
\nRewriteRule ^[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+\/(.*.php)$ $1 [L]
\nRewriteRule . index.php [L]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe issue is that the prompt for the username and password that should happen automagically cannot occur due to the rewrite rules.<\/p>\n
The rewrite rules are to look for a valid directory or file and if it is not a valid directory or file then redirect to the index.php which is what happens as the htpasswd AuthConfig process is not a valid file or directory (apparently – umm, so what is it? like is there another rewrite rule that would avoid this? obscure Apache voodoo)<\/p>\n
The fix is to create a valid file as an ErrorDocument directive for a 401 or 403 error (Authorisation errors) and have this at the top of the .htaccess file so that Apache will return a valid file flag and therefore allow the AuthConfig prompt to occur.<\/p>\n
Edit your top level .htaccess above the section for #Rewrite for WordPress<\/p>\n
\nErrorDocument 401 \/myerror.html
\nErrorDocument 403 \/myerror.html\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nif you dont want to put this dummy file in your site root then add the path to the filename<\/p>\n
\nErrorDocument 401 \/[path_to_file]\/myerror.html
\nErrorDocument 403 \/[path_to_file]\/myerror.html\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThen just create an empty file with that name in the appropriate path.<\/p>\n
The references that I used were:
\nhttp:\/\/www.scratch99.com\/2008\/10\/password-protecting-the-wp-admin-folder\/<\/a>
\nWhich is where I finally found a decent reference that was related to the issue and that blog referenced this one,<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/developedtraffic.com\/2007\/05\/27\/wordpress-admin-password-protection-404\/<\/a>
\nWhich pointed me at TextPattern http:\/\/textpattern.com\/faq\/173\/password-protected-directories-with-htaccess
\n<\/a>
\nand for good measure, this site helped to complete my understanding of why this process works.
\nhttp:\/\/www.ju-ju.com\/2006\/03\/17\/wordpress-404-error
\n<\/a>
\nThanks to the authors of each of those sites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Damn, but that was a long-winded process. I’ve just spent the better part of 4 hours reading and researching why I get (got, its fixed now)\u00a0 404 errors from wp-admin when I enabled .htaccess Authentication (htpasswd) for the wp-admin directory. It only happened with WordPress MU \/ Network config. googling for this error ends up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security","category-wordpress-links"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}