Text file authentication

Set up text file authentication

In EZproxy, you can use a text file to authenticate users by defining usernames and passwords manually. This method requires two parts:

• A separate text file (for example, myusers.txt) containing the list of usernames and password
• A directive inside your user.txt file that tells EZproxy where to find the credentials

Configuration

1. Create a file (myusers.txt) that contains a user identification optionally followed by a colon and user password. If this file was an extract of your library card numbers, it might simply contain lines like:

13524697531 
13587533212 

 If the file containes usernames and passwords, each line will contain a username, a colon, and a password. Avoid any extra spaces around the colon:

jsmith:secret
mdoe:codeword

Passwords are case-sensitive only in Hosted EZproxy. Usernames remain case-insensitive.

With Standalone EZproxy with file authentication, both usernames and passwords are checked using case-insensitive comparisons. This allows the usernames jsmith, JSMITH, JSmith to match along with the passwords secret, SECRET, sEcReT."
 

2. Save this file in the same directory as your user.txt unless configured otherwise.
    
3. Add the following directive to the user.txt file in your main EZproxy directory. This tells EZproxy to authenticate users against the external myusers.txt file:

::file=myusers.txt

 Note: Changes to user.txt take effect immediately. You do not have to restart EZproxy when you update this file, and if you create an updated version of myusers.txt, those changes will be available immediately.