Table Of Contents

Previous topic

Using Identity with Encrypted Passwords

Next topic

Identity Failure URL

Identity Recipes

This page is a repository of useful identity tips and tricks, and any small notes that don’t seem to have much of a home anywhere else.

Setting an Identity Failure URL

Please see the page IdentityFailureUrl for documentation on this topic.

Writing Your Own Predicates

Look at the source of the identity.conditions module to see how identity predicates are implemented. New predicates should derive from the Predicate and IdentityPredicateHelper classes from that module and implement a eval_with_object method and define an error_message class attribute.

Here’s a (slightly contrived) example that checks if the given identity is a member of the "premium users" group:

from turbogears.identity.conditions import Predicate, \
    IdentityPredicateHelper

class is_premium_user(Predicate, IdentityPredicateHelper):
    error_message = "Not member a member of the '%(group)s' group"

    def __init__(self):
        self.group = "premium users"

    def eval_with_object(self, identity, errors=None):
        if self.group in identity.groups:
            return True
        else:
            self.append_error_message(errors)
            return False

In this example, the eval_with_object method will receive the turbogears.identity.current object as the identity argument and possibly a list of error messages from identity predicates that have been checked before this one. The method returns True when the check passes, if not it will append it’s own error message to the errors list and return False.

The append_error_messages method inherited from identity.Predicate class takes the error_messages attribute, performs string interpolation on it, using the instance’s namespace as the substitutions dictionary and appends the resulting string to the given errors list as a side-effect.

Providing a Custom Passwort Encryption Function

The identity framework has two password hashing functions built in: MD5 and SHA1. But you can also provide your own custom password encryption function by setting the configuration setting identity.<provider>.encryption_algorithm to "custom" (where <provider is one of soprovider or saprovider if you use the standard TurboGears identity providers) and the setting identity.custom_encryption to the name of callable, which takes the unencrypted password (as a UTF-8-encoded string) and returns the password hash as a Unicode string. The name of the callable must be the full path to the callable, including the module name etc., in dotted path notation.

Here is a brief code example of how to use a custom encryption function, which uses the SHA256 hashing algorithm from the standard library module hashlib (only available in Python >= 2.5) in a project with the package name mytest, which uses the standard SqlAlchemyIdentityProvider:

import hashlib
import turbogears as tg

def sha256_hash(password):
    """Return SHA256 hash for given password as unicode."""
    return unicode(hashlib.sha256(password).hexdigest())

tg.config.update({
    'identity.custom_encryption': 'mytest.controllers.sha256_hash',
    'identity.saprovider.encryption_algorithm': "custom"})

Put this code in your controllers.py or command.py file (or any of your application’s modules that is imported on startup). You can test your custom password encryption with the interactive shell:

$ tg-admin sql create
$ tg-admin shell
>>> from mytest import controllers
>>> u = User(user_name=u'test', display_name=u'Test User',
    email_address=u'test@foo.com', password=u'Ken sent me')
>>> u.password
u'67d4d507a17e7f1db4e7e11db2b7a695292a17e53cbe4c8870d367fc30d03789'

Writing your own decorator function

This is not for the faint at heart, but it does give you absolute flexibility.

Take a look at the decorators in turbogears/identity/conditions.py. They’ll give you an idea of what you’ll need to do; it is simplest if your decorator subclasses turbogears.decorator. That will give you a solid basis for development and maintain compatibility with other default decorators.

Customizing the Identity Model

You can customize your own classes for users, groups, and/or permissions, adding attributes to the user class, say an image of the user and a phone number. You can even provide a complete replacement, but remember that the identity system references the automatically-generated classes and their elements by name, so you will need to provide a compatible interface.

Look at the source of the identity.soprovider and identity.saprovider modules to see how the current identity providers use the identity model. Basically, as long as you only add attributes to the auto-generated identity model, you’ll be fine. If you change the names of existing attributes, you are on your own. To stay compatible with the rest of the identity framework, you have to stay compatible with the documented interface.

Implementing a Custom Identity Provider

If you want total control over the authentication process, i.e how identity decides if a user is known and allowed to login, you have to implement a custom identity provider. You also need write your own provider, if you want to communicate with different database backend or an external authentication mechanism. See the contributed recipes in the sections below for examples on the latter.

You can sub-class one of the providers included with TurbGears, i.e. SqlObjectIdentityProvider` or SqlAlchemyIdentityProvider or write your own provider class from scratch. Check the mentioned standard providers for the methods which you have to implement.

If you sub-class one of the standard providers, you probably will only need to overwrite the validate_identity method to check if a user is valid and is allowed to log-in. On success, i.e. the user is authenticated, this method should return a valid identity object conforming to the identity interface, or return None on failure.

We provide an example TurboGears project coming with a custom identity provider which implements additional security checks on login. Furthermore this project demonstrates the following features:

  • How to sub-class a standard identity provider (see secsaprovider.py).
  • How to register the custom provider as an identity plug-in (see setup.py)
  • How to extend the standard identity data model in a backwards-compatible way (see model.py and secsaprovider.py)
  • How to set custom identity error messages (see SecSAIdentityProvider.authentication_error) and use them in the login page template (see controller.py and login.html)

Please download the project from the following link and see the included README.txt file for more information and pointers to documentation:

CustomIdentity-1.0.1.zip

Log in a User Object Manually

Sometimes you will need to log a user in directly instead of having them go through the regular login system. For instance if you are allowing administrators to assume the role of another user. This can be done with the following code:

identity.set_current_identity(identity)

Where identity is an instance of an object that conforms to the identity API and is associated with a User and a Visit instance. Such an identity instance is created by creating a VisitIdentity object (which links a user to a visit) and then using this to get an identity instance from the current identity provider.

The following function performs all the necessary steps, and works for either the SQLObject or the SQLAlchemy identity provider:

from turbogears import identity, visit
from mypkg.model import VisitIdentityKey

def login_user(user):
    """Associate given user with current visit & identity."""
    visit_key = visit.current().key
    try:
        link = VisitIdentity.by_visit_key(visit_key)
        # If you use SQLAlchemy, you can remove the try/except clause
        # around the above line so you don't have to import SQLObject
        # to check for the SQLObjectNotFound exception.
    except SQLObjectNotFound:
        link = None

    if not link:
        link = VisitIdentity(visit_key=visit_key, user_id=user.user_id)
    else:
        link.user_id = user.user_id

    user_identity = identity.current_provider.load_identity(visit_key)
    identity.set_current_identity(user_identity)

Note

A common use case for this recipe is logging in after successfully registering a new user. If you’re doing this make sure you have saved the new user record to the database using session.flush() or similar. Not doing so will cause errors later on in the process.

Contributed Tips & Tricks

Get a Reference to the Current Identity Information

If you want to log who’s making updates in the DB you can get this information from the User object:

identity.current.user

Do Something Special After Login

In some cases, you may want to perform a specific action when a user logs in. One way to do this is to modify the standard login kid template as follows:

<form action="/verify_login" method="POST">
  <input type="hidden" name="previous_url" value="${previous_url}"/>
  <!-- form continues on ... -->

Then, in your controllers.py, add the following controller method:

@expose()
def verify_login(self, previous_url='/login', **kw):
    user_logged_in = False
    if (not identity.current.anonymous
        and identity.was_login_attempted()
        and not identity.get_identity_errors()):
            user_logged_in = True
            # do your login stuff here. for instance you could do:
            flash('Welcome to TurboGears!')
    if previous_url == '/login' and user_logged_in:
        redirect('/')
    redirect(previous_url, **kw)

Essentially, you are routing all login attempts through your new verify_login controller before sending the request off to the final destination.

Changing the Database in Which Your Visit/Identity Tables Get Created

Contributed by RenierMorales on 2007-07-20 17:26:14.

If you don’t want to or can’t have TG create the Visit tables in the same DBMS where the rest of your application’s data resides, you can configure it so that they are created in a different DBMS.

Here is what I added to my project, per file:

dev.cfg / prod.cfg:

turbogears.visit.dburi = "sqlite:/home/renier/projects/www/dvo/visit.db"

model.py:

__visit_connection__ = PackageHub('turbogears.visit')
class Visit(SQLObject):
    _connection = __visit_connection__
    ...

class VisitIdentity(SQLObject):
    _connection = __visit_connection__
    ...

Now my Visit data is stored in an SQLite database separate from my application data. Change turbogears.visit.dburi in your configuration to specify any other type of database connection.

Authenticating Against an External Password Source

In some cases, you may want to authenticate against an external password source, while still using the standard identity models for storing all other user information.

For example, authenticating against an existing Windows/Samba domain controller allows your users to use the same password for your TurboGears project as they do to log in to Windows (the same concept applies to LDAP, etc.).

For an example of how to do this, see sosmbprovider.py, which subclasses the SQLObject provider but validates user names and passwords against a Windows domain. It’s not a pure SMB provider (only the user names and passwords are checked against the domain controller), so you still have to add users and groups (etc.) to the Identity tables.

If you are using SQLObject and want to validate usernames and passwords against an LDAP directory, see soldapprovider.py.

If you want to validate against an LDAP directory but are using Elixir or SQLAlchemy as your model, see, see saldapprovider.py.

For an example of how to validate user names and passwords against a UNIX password file or NIS Yellow Pages, see sopwdprovider.py.

In TurboGears 1.0 a validate_password() method was added to the SqlObjectIdentityProvider object in soprovider.py, making it much simpler to subclass and create your own provider.

The following sections contain recipes for authenticating against different types of authentication services.

Authenticate Against an LDAP Server

Contributed by anonymous on 2007-12-13 09:43:29.

A short description how to authenticate against my LDAP server:

The following example uses the soldapprovider.py file attached to this page, since the model used is SQLObject. For SQLAlchemy or Elixir, the instructions are similar. Only that you’ll have to use 'saldapprovider' as the identity.provider and similar changes.

  • Create an account to authenticate both in Turbogears and LDAP server.

  • Add the following entry in dev.cfg or app.cfg:

    identity.provider = 'soldapprovider'
    
  • Edit the entry_points.txt in your TurboGears installation directory, i.e. <site-package>/TurboGears-X.Y-py2.5.egg/EGG-INFO/entry_points.txt:

    • Search the block: [turbogears.identity.provider]

    • Add the following entry:

      soldapprovider = turbogears.identity.soldapprovider:SoLdapIdentityProvider
  • Add the linked file soldapprovider.py in the above description to your TurboGears installation, i.e. <site-packages>/TurboGears-X.Y-py2.5.egg/turbogears/identity/soldapprovider.py.

  • Edit the line filter = " ... " % user_name according to your LDAP server, e.g.:

    filter = "(uid=%s)" % user_name
    

Authenticate Against an LDAP Server (Updated)

These instructions are hopefully clearer than the ones above, and they don’t require you to muck about inside the TurboGears installation directories at all.

Download the file soldapprovider.py, and place it in the package of your project. Edit the file and make the following changes. I don’t think I have upload privileges to modify it directly, but these changes make the soldapprovider.py fully configuration driven and re-usable:

Change the import statement at the top of the file:

from soprovider import *

to this:

from turbogears.identity.soprovider import *

Change these lines:

self.basedn  = get("identity.soldapprovider.basedn", "dc=localhost")
self.autocreate = get("identity.soldapprovider.autocreate", False)

to this (adds another configuration option):

self.basedn  = get("identity.soldapprovider.basedn", "dc=localhost")
self.filter_id  = get("identity.soldapprovider.filter_id", "uid")
self.autocreate = get("identity.soldapprovider.autocreate", False)

Also, change this line:

filter = "(sAMAccountName=%s)" % user_name

to this:

filter = "(%s=%s)" % (self.filter_id, user_name)

Edit the file setup.py in your project directory. Look for the section that starts with entry_points = """ in the setup(...) call and add the following lines to add your identity provider to the list of providers that TurboGears has available (replace “yourpkg” withe the package name of your application):

'turbogears.identity.provider': [
         'soldapprovider = ofreports.soldapprovider:SoLdapIdentityProvider'
]

Then run "python setup.py egg_info" in our project directory to update the *.egg-info directory.

Edit your dev.cfg and add some configuration options for your environment:

identity.provider = 'soldapprovider'
identity.soldapprovider.host = 'localhost'
identity.soldapprovider.port = 389
identity.soldapprovider.basedn = 'ou=people,dc=yourdomain,dc=com'
identity.soldapprovider.filter_id = 'uid'

Make sure that the user login that you want to use exists in LDAP, and try to login.

HTTP Basic Authentication

HTTP Basic Authentication is already supported out of the box. Look into the identity.visitor module in the IdentityVisitPlugin.identity_from_http_auth method for the implementation. This should be easy to enhance with support for Digest authentication.