How to restrict the staging environment in Openshift from being accessed by others

Question

I have been reading about release management for Openshift and have found a nice process described in Openshifts official blog. According to this process you develop the application locally, then deploy it to a staging environment and in the end, when everything is working, you deploy it to production.

The information I am looking for, but can't find, is how to restrict the access to the staging environment. This environment should only be used by me to test the application in a production-like environment and should not be accessible by other people. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Using the PHP cartridge allows you to do this in a couple of different ways:

• Using an .htaccess file

  • Basic Auth - You can use htaccess basic authentication to restrict access to your site. You will be asked for a username/password to access your sites content. You can learn more about Basic Authentication here: http://engineering.oregonstate.edu/computing/web/43 and you can build your .htaccess file here (http://www.htaccesstools.com/htaccess-authentication/) You can use action hooks (https://developers.openshift.com/en/managing-action-hooks.html) to move the .htaccess and .htpasswd files into place when you deploy your website to staging, i would suggest based on an environment variable of some kind.
  • Allowed IP Address - You can also use an .htaccess file to allow only your ip address to access that website (.htaccess block all but my ip) which seems like it would be the most convenient way, unless your ip address changes a lot. You can use the same action hook method to move the .htaccess file into place based on the existence of an environment variable.

• Using PHP

  • You can also use php code to block access to your website by checking the visitors ip address, along with the existence of an environment variable something like:

  if ($visitors_ip != "x.x.x.x") { exit(); }