How to automate generation of htpasswd from command line without typing password?

Question

I am trying to automate creating a password from the command line. I have tried the below but it still keeps asking for the password.

echo "test101" | htpasswd -c ~/temp/password admin

How to generate automate htpasswd from command line without typing password?

Aigneis

Answer 1

Why not just use:

htpasswd -b -c ~/temp/password admin test101

Aristaeus

Although it's old: Because all other users on the same system may be able see "test101" in /proc/<uid>/cmdline for a short moment, if they are watching. – Passible

This is the case if your system has more than 1 users, for creating initial example to setup a server and generate htpasswd, this will have no problem. – Divider

Answer 2

If you don't have htpasswd installed (for example when using nginx) you can generate a password with openssl.

printf "USER:$(openssl passwd -crypt PASSWORD)\n" >> .htpasswd

Alaniz

-crypt is considered insecure today. You can use -apr1 instead. – Ama

Nginx also accepts SHA-256, that's even better then APR1 (MD5), for that use -5 instead. – Ama

@GustavoVargas I've used this in the past but now it gives an error: passwd: Option unknown option -5. – Advisement

@FabianBarney maybe your openssl is outdated. Take a look on this openssl command line reference: mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/openssl_passwd.1.asp – Ama

Answer 3

The -b switch should do the trick, but the password will still be visible to other users on the system via the process list (ps etc):

htpasswd -b -c ~/temp/password admin test101

Panter

Answer 4

From the man page of htpasswd we get this:

-i Read the password from stdin without verification (for script usage).

So just acording to your question something like this should work:

echo "test101" | htpasswd -c -i ~/temp/password admin

But the password will be visible in history and process list.

To automate creating a password from the command line i would write the plain password to a file and do something like that:

htpasswd -c -i ~/temp/password admin < ~/temp/pass_plain

Afterwards delete the pass_plain file.

Also make sure the pass_plain file is not readable by anyone else, also if its just there for a few seconds.

Od

This feature was added between httpd-tools-2.2.15-69 (CentOS 6) and before httpd-tools-2.4.6-88 (CentOS 7) so it is not universally available. – Cortex

sudo apt-get install apache2-utils in case of ubuntu – Judijudicable

To avoid the history/process list issue, wouldnt it be easier and simpler to just cat and pipe? Something like cat ~/temp/pass_plain | htpasswd -c -i ~/temp/password admin? – Synthesis