Magento2 – Fix 401 Page from Admin to Setup Wizard

So when you have the case of Magento being served out of pub one solution to have access to setup is to configure an alias. To do that in apache, you may do something like the following.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName m2.local
    ServerAdmin jamby77@gmail.com
    DocumentRoot "/var/www/magento202/pub"

    <Directory "/var/www/magento202/pub">
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
    Alias "/setup" "/var/www/magento202/setup"
    Alias "/update" "/var/www/magento202/update"
</VirtualHost>

Probably not the most elegant solution but it works.

As you noted this has been confirmed as an issue on Github here: github.com/magento/magento2/issues/5247

However this has been closed as it is a duplicate of: https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/4159

This issue thread also details a workaround until the fix is merged into the next Magento release, which is to switch your webserver root to that of the Magento root path, not the /pub subdirectory.

I have verified this works on CE 2.1 (you need to clean cache after this change), however I would personally not recommend using this workaround on a production environment as is less secure.