Generating the user password file for .htaccess usage...

[dnebing]

Maybe I'm just dumb, but I can't find any documentation regarding the setup of the user password file. Only thing I found was a short blurb indicating the file contains "nameassword" pairs with a brief statement that password is encoded using crypt(). Is there supposed to be some tool to create this file? Will the htpasswd program from apache generate the correctly formatted files?

If I need to roll my own tool (I am a developer, so this is not an issue), what value do I need to pass in to crypt() as the salt so LS will be able to handle it?

IMHO the security stuff is probably worthy of being added to the FAQ. I'd guess that a lot of servers would have at least one secured area and would need to know how to create this file...