The first version of OLS 1.8 was released 7 months ago. It is still not marked as stable and is not available in the repos. In your experience, is this branch suitable for production? Version 1.7 appears to be no longer being developed.
On Ubuntu 24.04 and OLS 1.7.19 I had to move the htpasswd file from default location $SERVER_ROOT/conf/vhosts/$VH_NAME/ to $VH_ROOT/ and change the owner to nobody:nogroup. Without this change I also couldn't log in, because the login window was constantly displayed.