Adding a login

1. What and why
2. Prerequisites
3. Basic auth (easy, a bit inconvient and ugly)
   1. Nginx
   2. Apache
4. Minecraft login with permissions (medium, convenient for users)
5. Advanced software (hardest, most flexible)

What and why

Almost always your map is fully open for everyone to view. But sometimes you just don’t feel like sharing it. Reasons for this might include:

• whitelisted friend only smp
• staff only map
• map is a paid rank perk

There are multiple ways of adding a login page. The ways range from a simple shared password to a minecraft command and a full-on SSO solution.

Prerequisites

Authentication is a very advanced topic and you will need more stuff than just a Minecraft server. You should have a proper server where you can run these services. Before you even begin, your map should already be running behind an external webserver or a proxy for HTTPS so that credentials aren’t sent plaintext over the internet. You should also have basic understanding of hosting web applications (webservers, dns, ssl/tls).

Basic auth (easy, a bit inconvient and ugly)

Basic auth is the most… basic… form of authentication. It simply asks for a username and password which are configured in a file. It is often handled by an external webserver such as Nginx or Apache.

You can create the config file with the htpasswd utility by Apache. On Debian based distros it is in the apache2-utils package, or the httpd-tools package on RedHat based distros (RHEL/CentOS/Oracle Linux). To create a new file and the first user use htpasswd -c /path/to/file/.htpasswd user. To create a new user use use htpasswd /path/to/file/.htpasswd another_user.

Nginx

Add these lines inside a server or location directive in your BlueMap’s Nginx config:

auth_basic "BlueMap";
auth_basic_user_file /path/to/file/.htpasswd; 

Apache

Apache authentication happens at Directory level so if you have DocumentRoot /var/www/bluemap you will need this inside your BlueMap’s Apache config:

<Directory "/var/www/bluemap">
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "BlueMap"
    AuthUserFile /path/to/file/.htpasswd
    Require valid-user
</Directory>

Minecraft login with permissions (medium, convenient for users)

If you want to restrict users to your BlueMap based on their Minecraft permissions such as one given by a permission group/rank you should read about Chicken/Auth which is an amazing project made by a community member of ours.

Advanced software (hardest, most flexible)

There are also many more projects out there that could be used for authentication and authorization. Battle-tested large SSO and identity provider applications such as Authentik or Authelia. Even though these applications are large and complicated, the benefit is that they can handle many different kinds of logins and more complex setups. Explaining the setup of them would go way beyond this wiki so you will be better off reading their official instructions. Please note that setting these up is not an easy task and you will need some experience.