Authentication is activated by the authenticate directive with the value collection or document depending on whether authentication is to be performed on the full collection or on a per-document basis (the default value is collection). If authentication is on a document basis, then one can either specify a list of private documents (in which case all others are public) or a list of public documents (in which case all others are private) using directives private_documents or public_documents. The documents themselves are specified using Greenstone document identifiers (separated by spaces): the easiest way to determine these is to locate each document in the collection and look at the d argument in its Greenstone URL.

The auth_groups directive specifies the Greenstone groups for to which access will be permitted, if the document (or collection) is one of those that requires authentication. It is followed by a group name (or a list of group names separated by spaces). The Greenstone admin pages allow you to define groups and add members to them.

authenticate collection
auth_groups private_cols_group

1. Source setup.bash in the gsdl directory
2. In the gsdl/etc directory, run db2txt users.db >users.db.txt
3. Run getpw, and enter your desired password (twice)
4. Copy the output of the getpw program over the password entry for the admin user in the users.db.txt file
5. Run cat users.db.txt | txt2db users.db to write the new users.db file