Https/Apache share to new users

Trying to add a new user on apache so as to share some of my media folders via https. I read some similar posts, and created successfully a user/pass called external using htpasswd. Then, in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled I created a file alias.external.conf which looks as follows (following other files that were already there)

Alias /downloads "/home/myuser/media"
<Directory "media">
 Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
  AllowOverride None
        AuthType Digest
        AuthName "Downloads"
        AuthUserFile '/etc/htpasswd'
        Require user external
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
  php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>

When I try to log in however, it does not accept “external”'s username/pass, but does accept “myuser”'s. I suspect there’s some user override happening somewhere, but can’t figure it out. Any ideas? Is there a streamlined way of doing this? I would rather use https than nextcloud or any of the fancier options. Thanks.