Apache Basic Auth through a Reverse Proxy

It took me like a whole day of googling to figure this out.Say you have a web service that doesn't have any form of authentication and you want to open it up to a public ip but still setup some security. If you are this guy then you may want to try basic auth.

Step 1 : Create password file
htpasswd -c /home/user/.passwdFile <username>

Step 2 : Setup the reverse proxy
Setup the reverse proxy

LoadModule proxy_module      modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule headers_module    modules/mod_headers.so
LoadModule ssl_module        modules/mod_ssl.so
LoadModule auth_digest_module modules/mod_auth_digest.so

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyVia Off

ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:1234/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:1234/

127.0.0.1:1234 is the url:port that your webservice is running on. From the above commands your app will be open at 127.0.0.1:80
Remember to include the relevant modules as has been done above the proxy stuff

Step 3 : Setup basic authentication. My mistake was that I was using directory instead of location. Directory refers to to the filesystem while Location refers to webspace..url and stuff
so...

<Location />
    AllowOverride AuthConfig
    Options ExecCGI
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "My awesome webservice"
    Require valid-user
    AuthUserFile /home/user/.passwdFile
</Location>


So put this in your httpd.conf file and restart apache.There you have it basic auth on a reverse proxy.
Bigups to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5011102/apache-reverse-proxy-with-basic-authentication ,
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/auth.html