I use .htaccess to password protect my website and that works great. My directory structure for the site is as follows:

/var/www/localhost/htdocs

Where htdocs is the first subdirectory that the apache2 server can access. I put my .htaccess file in the htdocs directory and, like it should, it protects that directory and all the various sub-directories I have beneath the htdocs directory. Now here is the problem, I want to put a public sub-directory immediately beneath htdocs which will not require a password to access. All other files and directories below htdocs should still require the password for access. In other words, I want one single sub-directory of htdocs to be exempt from password protection.

I tried to do this with the following .htacess file but it keeps giving me a server configuration error:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Entry to this site is by invitation only!"
AuthUserFile "/var/www/localhost/htdocs/.htpasswd"
require valid-user
#
# ---Allow only one public directory with no password needed for access---
<Directory /var/www/localhost/htdocs/public/*>
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from All
</Directory>

How can I configure .htaccess to restrict all but the public sub-directory? Thanks for your help.

As I understand it the .htaccess files is used on a per-directory basis rather than globally, so you may need more than one of them.
Have you read the appropriate section in the manual?

http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/howto/auth.html

__________________
Nick B.
http://www.nowindows.net
http://www.mozilla.org

Thanks, I figured it out. The following seems to work just fine if added to the apache config file:

###
###--------------------------------------------------------
### Setup a public directory without any password needed for access.
### This "public" directory will be accessable even
### if .htaccess is installed
### in a higher level (i.e., "htdocs") directory.
### Alternatively, you could omit this statement and
### simply add an .htaccess file to the "public"
### directory which would contain only the two lines:
### Allow from all
### Satisfy any
###
<Directory "/var/www/localhost/htdocs/public/">
Allow from all
Satisfy any
</Directory>