Skip to main content
OCLC Support

Text file authentication

If you want EZproxy to perform user authentication from a text file, follow these steps:

  1. Create a file that contains a user identification optionally followed by a colon and user password. If this file was an extract of your library card numbers, it might simply contain lines like:

    13524697531 
    13587533212 
    
    

    If the file contained usernames and passwords, it might look like:

    jsmith:secret 
    mdoe:codeword 
    
    

     Note: Passwords are case-sensitive only in Hosted EZproxy. Usernames remain case-insensitive.

    With Standalone EZproxy with file authentication, both usernames and passwords are checked using case-insensitive comparisons. This allows the usernames jsmith, JSMITH, JSmith to match along with the passwords secret, SECRET, sEcReT."

  2. Copy this file to your EZproxy server.
  3. In your main EZproxy directory, edit the user.txt file and add a line like:
    ::file=myusers.txt
    Note: Changes to user.txt take effect immediately. You do not have to restart EZproxy when you update this file, and if you create an updated version of myusers.txt, those changes will be available immediately.