I have been helping a friend setup a dedicated server to host his clients sites on and wanted to make things as streamlined and as easy as possible. To do so I installed Apache 2.2, PHP5, XCache and mod_fcgid. I am using suexec with Apache to run the scripts as the users who own the scripts.

I wanted to verify that XCache was working, so I copied the XCache admin directory into one of the document roots and tried to login. To my surprise I was not able to login even though I was using a known good md5 password hash in the XCache configuration.

It took me about a month of searching to find out that the server variables PHP_AUTH_USER and PHP_AUTH_PW don’t seem to work with mod_fcgid. This Lighttpd forum entry led me to the XCache admin config.php.

Here is what is required:

  1. Create a file in your XCache admin directory called config.php

  2. In this file add the following, using the information you provided in the XCache configuration:

    <?php $_SERVER[‘PHP_AUTH_USER’] = ‘admin_username’; $_SERVER[‘PHP_AUTH_PW’] = ‘admin_password’; ?>

  3. Configure some other means of authentication such as htpasswd or htdigest