Hey folks, so this comes up really often with Rackspace customers, how to add AuthType Basic HTTP authentication. This is akin to an additional user/pass dialog box which appears when navigating to the url. It is really easy to create a new password:

htpasswd -c /etc/httpd/.htpasswd-private username

Please note .htpasswd-private can be anything, however it’s better to make it a hidden file by prefixing with a . dot, also important to ensure that the password file isn’t in a web documentroot, the file should have user and group root root, but that should be done automatically when you create the file with root user.

This is what I added to phpmyadmin configuration file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpMyAdmin.conf

 
<Location "/phpMyAdmin/">
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Private Server"
AuthUserFile /etc/httpd/.htpasswd-private
Require valid-user
</Location>

You could do the same for WordPress;

<Location "/wp-admin/">
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Private Server"
AuthUserFile /etc/httpd/.htpasswd-private
Require valid-user
</Location>

Please note that I am using Location, but you can apply the same thing within a directive instead.