pas.plugins.external_auth 0.1

A plugin to allow external authentication informations (commonly headers from apache to work with most SSO) to create users and groups.

Introduction

This package propose a plugin for Zope PAS not only to manage authentication from an external source, mostly HTTP headers provided by some SSO, thing it does in a scriptable and highly configurable manner, but also to manage groups definition, groups belonging, and users properties .

The use case this package was created for was to integrate a Shibboleth SSO for Plone coupled with a group management application known as GROUPER, at University of geneva. In our case, Shibboleth, the SSO, fill up headers from GROUPER groups definitions and we needed them in Plone to manage local roles and permissions.

Known Bugs

The principle of solution relies on the ability of PAS to have multiple source of users and group plugins. Unfortunatly ther is a bug in this feature implementation both in Zope and Plone rewrite see bug #12794 . Once this will be corrected undoubtely but for those versions of plone and PAS for which it is not, you could use the following monkey patch in __init__.py (this one is for Plone GroupsTool):

from Products.PlonePAS.tools.groups import GroupsTool
from AccessControl.requestmethod import postonly
if not hasattr(GroupsTool, '_patched_ea__'):

    @postonly
    def removeGroup(self, group_id, keep_workspaces=0, REQUEST=None):
        """Remove a single group, including group workspace, unless
        keep_workspaces==true.
        """
        retval = False
        managers = self._getGroupManagers()
        if not managers:
            raise NotSupported, 'No plugins allow for group management'

        for mid, manager in managers:
            if manager.getGroupById(group_id):
                if manager.removeGroup(group_id):
                    retval = True

        gwf = self.getGroupWorkspacesFolder()
        if retval and gwf and not keep_workspaces:
            grouparea = self.getGroupareaFolder(group_id)
            if grouparea is not None:
                workspace_id = grouparea.getId()
                if hasattr(aq_base(gwf), workspace_id):
                    gwf._delObject(workspace_id)

        self.invalidateGroup(group_id)
        return retval

    @postonly
    def addPrincipalToGroup(self, principal_id, group_id, REQUEST=None):
        managers = self._getGroupManagers()
        if not managers:
            raise NotSupported, 'No plugins allow for group management'
        for mid, manager in managers:
            if manager.getGroupById(group_id):
                if manager.addPrincipalToGroup(principal_id, group_id):
                    return True
        return False

    @postonly
    def removePrincipalFromGroup(self, principal_id, group_id, REQUEST=None):
        managers = self._getGroupManagers()
        if not managers:
            raise NotSupported, 'No plugins allow for group management'
        for mid, manager in managers:
            if manager.getGroupById(group_id):
                if manager.removePrincipalFromGroup(principal_id, group_id):
                    return True
        return False

    GroupsTool.removeGroup = removeGroup
    GroupsTool.addPrincipalToGroup = addPrincipalToGroup
    GroupsTool.removePrincipalFromGroup = removePrincipalFromGroup

    GroupsTool._patched_ea__ = True

Also, we just need to test the proxy part which we don’t use actually, or remove it. If you experience problem with it you should use the redirect to external url scheme. Also with some versions of python this could not work with https (because of a bug in old urllib2).

TODO

• Unit tests

• More Documentation

• redirect on logout url doesn’t work

• Consistent profiles for use without Plone.

COPYLEFT

Copyright (C) 2012 Smile Suisse See COPYING for copyright informations and LICENSE.txt for a copy of GPLv3 license in source package “docs” directory.

Changelog

0.1 (beta)

• Initial release

pas.plugins.external_auth package installation

We provide standard zc.buildout installation instruction.

• Add pas.plugins.external_auth to the list of eggs to install:

[buildout]
...
eggs =
    ...
    pas.plugins.external_auth

• If you don’t use plone with z3c.autoinclude, tell the plone.recipe.zope2instance recipe to install a ZCML slug:

[instance]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
...
zcml =
    pas.plugins.external_auth

• Re-run buildout, e.g. with:

$ ./bin/buildout

You can skip the ZCML slug if you are going to explicitly include the package from another package’s configure.zcml file.

Installation in zope

Once this is done you can use provided profiles to populate your PAS. Two of them are provided for version 3 and 4 of Plone as default unconfigured example. The one which is used by cmfquickinstaller is targeted at Plone 4 empty profile so you could just install the product with plone control panel.

Those profiles are more examples than real use case. They are intended to be used as a basis for a real profile correspondig to your configuration, unless you prefer to just use TTW ZMI configuration. Anyway using the install product through zope for external_auth has not much sense except for quickly evaluating the product.

Once ou have configured at least one plugin in acl_users, go into ZMI management page of tyhis plugin and follow the main page configuration instructions.