Setting environment variables in .htaccess

[Gerry]

It seems environment variables don't work as expected on LiteSpeed and aren't compatible with the way Apache does things.

I have this, which works on Apache:

SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/path/to/admin.*$" adminUri

AuthName "Password protected"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile ./.htpasswd
Require valid-user

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from env=adminUri
Satisfy any

Searching around brought up that LiteSpeed doesn't handle SetEnvIf at all and that it should be done with rewriterules. The problem is that it doesn't work either:

RewriteRule ^/path/to/admin - [E=AppDisablePasswordProtect:1]

AuthName "Password protected"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile ./.htpasswd
Require valid-user

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from env=AppDisablePasswordProtect
Satisfy any

Furthermore, setting an environment variable and using it in, for example, PHP doesn't work either:

RewriteRule (.*) - [E=FOO:BAR]

PHP Code:

<?
print_r($_ENV);

Any pointers on how to solve these two issues?