Using AWS Elastic Load Balancing with a password-protected site

Scenario: you have a password-protected site running in EC2 that you want handled via Amazon Elastic Load Balancing. The problem with that is that the HTTP healthchecks from the ELB to the instance hosting your site will fail because they will get a 401 HTTP status code instead of 200. Hence the instance will be marked as 'out of service' by the ELB.

My solution was to serve one static file (I called it 'check.html' containing the text 'it works!') without password protection.

In my case, I have nginx handling both the dynamic app (which is a Django app running on port 8000) and the static files. Here are the relevant excerpts from nginx.conf (check.html is in /usr/local/nginx/static-content):

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    upstream django {
        server 127.0.0.1:8000;
    }

    server {
        listen       80;

        location / {
            proxy_pass http://django/;
            auth_basic            "Restricted";
            auth_basic_user_file  /usr/local/nginx/conf/.htpasswd;
        }

        location ~* ^.+check\.html$
        {
            root   /usr/local/nginx/static-content;
        }
    }
}