The recipe on the documentation page Authenticating against Django’s user database from Apache:
[Sat Feb 16 00:40:01 2008] [error] [client localhost] (9)Bad file descriptor: Could not open password file: (null), referer: https://localhost/media/adminmedia/css/global.css
The solution for me was to include the AuthUserFile /dev/null directive to the Location tag:
<Location /example/>
AuthType Basic
AuthName "example.com"
AuthBasicAuthoritative Off
AuthUserFile /dev/null
Require valid-user
SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE mysite.settings
PythonAuthenHandler django.contrib.auth.handlers.modpython
</Location>
Although the title of this ticket says Apache 2.2, i have not tested this on other Apache versions.
Without the AuthUserFile /dev/null directive everything works fine however apache prints the error log message for each request that uses the authentication handler. Which grows the error_log with inappropriate messages, so i think it's useful to add this to the documentation page.
