I have a website running on an AWS EC2 Amazon Linux 2 AMI with Apache and PHP/Laravel. It's a test site though and I want to password-protect the site via .htpasswd. Even after following several tutorials, I can't seem to get it working. It's worth noting that the site works perfectly fine without the .htpasswd configuration.

When I try to set it up and go to the site, it prompts me for the user name and password, but upon properly entering them, I get the following error:

To set up the .htpasswd file, I ran the following commands:

cd ~
htpasswd -c .htpasswd project-name # Then input a password when prompted to.
sudo chown ec2-user:apache .htpasswd
sudo chmod 777 .htpasswd

I then added the following to the .htaccess file in the public directory of the Laravel project:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Restricted Access"
AuthUserFile /home/ec2-user/.htpasswd
Require valid-user

And when I try to load the site, I get the above error. If I comment out the four lines in the .htaccess file, then it works fine, but I can't get it to work otherwise. I'm not sure what's going on, as the Apache config is fairly straightforward.

If it matters, I did add a virtual host config to Apache's httpd.conf file. It looks something like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName ip-address
    DocumentRoot /var/www/project-name/public
    <Directory /var/www/project-name>
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Also, I'm not sure if it matters, but because this is a test site, there's no domain name associated with it. It's only accessible via an IP address.

I've tried restarting the Apache service and anything else I can think of, but to no avail. Does anyone have any thoughts as to what I might be doing wrong? Thank you.