I've been trying to setup a password protected directory in a SSL website as follows:

/etc/nginx/sites-available/default

server {
    listen 443:
    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /usr/certs/server.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /usr/certs/server.key;

    server_name server1.example.com;

    root /var/www/example.com/htdocs/;
    index index.html;

    location /secure/ {
        auth_basic "Restricted";
        auth_basic_user_file /var/www/example.com/.htpasswd;
    }
}

The problem is when I try to access the URL https://server1.example.com/secure/, I get a "404: Not Found" error page.

My error.log shows the following error:

011/11/26 03:09:06 [error] 10913#0: *1 no user/password was provided for basic authentication,
client: 192.168.0.24, server: server1.example.com, request: "GET /secure/ HTTP/1.1",
host: "server1.example.com"

However, I was able to setup password protected directories for a normal HTTP virtual host without any problems.

Is it a problem with the config or something else?