Learn more about HAProxy Basic Auth and how to set it up from our experts. Our HAProxy Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

HAProxy Basic Auth | An Introduction

HAProxy Basic Auth is a popular feature of the HAProxy load balancer. It allows us to secure access to backend servers by pushing users to authenticate themselves with a username and password. This occurs via HTTP Basic Authentication.

HAProxy Basic Auth allows us to set up a username and password for a specific backend server or group of servers. Each time a user tries to access the server, they have to enter their credentials. The user gets access to the server only if the credentials are correct.

A key benefit of HAProxy Basic Auth is that it offers an additional layer of security for our backend servers. It helps us prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data or resources.

Furthermore, since HAProxy is a highly configurable load balancer, we can set up different levels of authentication for different backend servers or groups of servers, according to our specific security needs.

How to enable HAProxy Basic Auth

1. First, open the HAProxy configuration file located at /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg and head to the section that defines your backend servers.
2. Then add these lines:

   # Require authentication for backend server
acl auth_ok http_auth(user) username
http-request auth realm AuthRealm if !auth_ok

   Remember to replace username and AuthRealm with the username we want to use for authentication and the name of the authentication realm that we want to use respectively.
3. Now, it is time to create a password file by running this command:

   sudo htpasswd -c /etc/haproxy/passwd username
4. Then, run this command to reload the HAProxy configuration file:

   sudo service haproxy reload

After the above steps, HAProxy Basic Auth will be up and running. When a user attempts to access the server, they are prompted to enter their credentials. If the credentials are correct, they get access to the server.

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Conclusion

To sum up, our Support Techs introduced us to HAProxy Basic Authentication and demonstrated how to enable it.