Harp v0.11.1 – Basic Authentication support

If you need a fast way to limit access to an entire static site or client-side application, Harp v0.11.1 is for you.

Install or Update Harp

If you haven’t tried Harp before, there is a helpful getting started guide. Otherwise, install or update Harp using:

sudo npm install -g harp

Adding Basic Authentication

In your project’s harp.json or _harp.json file, adding the following line will password protect the entire Harp app:

{
  "basicAuth": "Ali Baba:Open, Sesame!"
}

You may also specify multiple username and password combinations to authenticate against:

{
  "basicAuth": ["user1:pass1", "user2:pass2", "user3:pass3"]
}

Harp’s basicAuth has been added to the documentation, too.

Harp and Brad Frost’s Project Hub

In the most recent edition of Harp Weekly, Brad Frost’s Project Hub was featured, originally introduced in his article for 24 ways. He says a Project Hub

consolidates all the key design and development materials onto a single webpage … (either publicly available or password protected), so that everyone involved in the team has easy access to it. Brad Frost, Project Hubs: A Home Base for Design Projects

With basic authentication, Harp is even better for Project Hubs, as you can quickly add password protection to an entire site needed. Jorge Pedret’s Project Hub boilerplate for Harp is ready to support this; just update the _harp.json file.

Other changes in Harp v0.11.1

Preparing for !!!

There are no breaking changes in this release of Harp, but to try and avoid any inconveniences in the future, it would be a good idea to change !!! to doctype any Jade templates.

A change was made to Jade which no longer allows !!! in Jade, but we have decided not to update Harp to use this version of Jade yet. We’re hoping to make this a smooth transition for anyone using Jade, but if you’d like to avoid any potential issues, the safest approach would be to change !!! to doctype in your applications.

The _layout.jade file created by harp init now uses doctype instead of !!! to help mitigate this problem. If you have more questions about, feel free to ask.

CLI Improvements

There were also some tweaks made to the CLI shown when you run harp server.

Looking forward

Hope you enjoy Harp v0.11.1! The next version of Harp is already underway. Subscribe to Harp Weekly, or follow @HarpWebServer on Twitter to be notified when it’s available.