I couldn't find an answer on the web and I'm trying for days now so I hope that someone with more experience with apache can help me out.

Iam writing an web editor and the user should be able to edit a file that is on the server in a directory the user has access to.

The problem Iam facing is that I need to authenticate against the system users (shadow/passwd). So the user should be able to login whith a system account and then the node app which does all the logic should be started with the users rights.

I hope to get this working without any additional script and only with Apache.

I found out two things:

1. I can use mod_auth_pam to authenticate the user
2. There is a mod called suEXEC which can exec the node app with a specified user

The problem is that I have to hard code which user is used by suEXEC but I want to decide when the user logs in.

Is there any way to authenticate a user against the shadow/passwd and then exec a prog with the users rights?

I dont want to run the node app as root and the user should only be able to access his own files.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks, Kodak