If your web site ever needs to protect its folders in .htaccess-way, eq. like you probably did it with Apache then please follow the steps in the guideline provided below.

To enable .htaccess protection feature open web site properties and then navigate “.htaccess” tab on the page. In case if you could not find the corresponding tab, please ensure that your hosting plan and/or hosting provider has enabled and/or supports that feature.

From there go ahead and click “Enable Helicon Ape” button to turn on that .htaccess protection feature on the web site-level or you can first click “Help” link to learn more regarding that feature from the vendor’s web site (the link will be opened in a new window). When you press the button you will be asked whether you want to enable and disable some other features for the web site as leaving those enabled could potentially affect the module that delivers that protection for your web site.

Please review the message displayed carefully identifying whether the features being asked to disable automatically are crucial to your web site and turning those off might have a negative impact on it. Once you read the message and want to continue, then press OK button to enable the feature.

As might see from the screenshot above you can create and manage protected folders, eq. “.htaccess folder”, users and groups. In this way you can grant/deny access to web site resources(folders and their content) to users and groups based on your specific security/protection requirements. We will give you a sample scenario in which a company needs to restrict access to the web site folders resources based on the following group membership:

• FTEs (Full-Time Employees);
• Marketing;
• Members;

First we create some user accounts and grant them membership in corresponding groups via “Add User”/”Add Group” wizards. Please find below a couple of screenshots depicting that relationships we established between users and groups. Note, that you not necessarily have to add users to group(s) but you are also allowed to grant access to a specific users.

Note: You can pickup whatever name you want for a user, we used prefixes (FTE., Marketing. and etc) only for clarification purposes and there is no any requirement to prefix user name with a group name.

Once we established relationships between users and groups, we are ready to move on to enable protection on the web site’s folders. Please referrer to the screenshots below to get an idea of how you can grant access to a folder for specific users/groups and deny access to everyone else.

To create new .htaccess-protected folder, just pick a folder’s name from “Folder Path” dialog and click “Update” button to save your changes.

Here is an outlook of our sample security schema we established for the imaginary company’s web site.

Finally, to grant access to users/groups on a particular folder, go ahead and click that yellow shield button to launch a wizard that will help you to establish a security scheme for that particular web site’s folder. Once you are satisifed with the options chosen, click “Update” button to save your changes made to the folder’s security schema.

This feature is available in:

• WebsitePanel v1.2.0 and up;