I am writing a simple admin tool in PHP for my own personal use that I would like to host on the free Azure Websites tier. I need to secure the site through a simple authentication scheme such as .htpasswd under *NIX servers.
Are there any recommended approaches to do this when running the site in PHP?
I have looked at the options in web.config, however they all appear to require a Windows user-account against which to authenticate. I have taken a look at Windows Azure Basic Authentication but I'm not too sure how I could run appcmd.exe against this website.
I have checked out the Windows Azure Active Directory integration options, but I can't see anything I can call from PHP (is there a RESTful API I can call maybe?).
I don't particularly want to write my own authentication handler and don't particularly want to run a micro-instance Linux VM....
If you are looking for simple authentication you can hard code the username and password combination in the login script itself and the info will be protected. If that does not satisfy your requirement you can use free version of mysql and store credentials their before using it. these two options are the simplest and free you can use. Also Active Directory or UAC based auth are overkill for your small project.
There is a Sample project that shows how to do Single Sign-on with Windows Azure Active Directory using PHP.
I haven't tested this code out in Windows Azure Web Sites as of yet, but it is available as a sample if you'd like to get an idea as to how you may be able to implement your own Auth Provider.