This guide will walk you through setting up basic authentication in Nginx. Additional steps might be needed if you authenticate your users in some other way or have an existing authentication system already in place.
This is totally unrelated with question asked. Need a django specific solution.
I apologize, I missed that the question was tagged Django. It seems the best option for implementing this in Django is the XSendfile method which is supported by apache. This thread compares some methods and includes examples like this one;
@login_required
def serve_file(request, filename):
fullname = myapp.settings.PRIVATE_AREA+filename
try:
f = file(fullname, "rb")
except Exception, e:
return page_not_found(request, template_name='404.html')
try:
wrapper = FileWrapper(f)
response = HttpResponse(wrapper, mimetype=mimetypes.guess_type(filename)[0])
response['Content-Length'] = os.path.getsize(fullname)
response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename={0}'.format(filename)
return response
except Exception, e:
return page_not_found(request, template_name='500.html')