authhttp DokuWiki HTTP authentication plugin
         Copyright (c) 2013 Pieter Hollants <[email protected]>
           Licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL) version 3


NOTE: This auth plugin requires DokuWiki WeatherWax (2013-05-10a) or later!


DESCRIPTION

This auth plugin should be installed in certain scenarios if you configured
your Webserver to do HTTP authentication. If you did not, the plugin will report
an error and DokuWiki's ACL won't work.

The very moment you enable HTTP authentication in the Webserver and a user
authenticates successfully, PHP provides these credentials to PHP scripts
through $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] and $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']. Out of the box,
DokuWiki will pick these up and pretend the user supplied those through the
login form. It will perform authentication using the configured auth plugin
and, if successful, show the user (and the admin) options depending on the auth
plugin's capabilities.

With HTTP authentication this all works out as long as
- EITHER DokuWiki's auth plugin does NOT have capabilities such as "change login
  name", "change password", "add user", "edit user", "delete user"
- OR the Webserver and DokuWiki's auth plugin use the SAME source for their
  authentication.

If the first condition is not true, the user can change his password through
the "User profile" function. The admin, through the "User manager", can also
change his login name, delete him or add him with a different login name. In all
of these scenarios, if the second condition is ALSO not true, there will be
inconsistencies between the HTTP authentication (which might eg. use an old
password) and DokuWiki's auth plugin (which might have stored a new password
somewhere else), causing Single Sign-On to break and errors to be displayed.

Note that this is not a bug in DokuWiki - DokuWiki can't in any way know how
your Webserver's HTTP authentication has been set up. For example, if you
configure your Webserver to display the username/password prompt but not
validate them, there is no problem at all since DokuWiki is the only entity
doing actual authentication. This might actually be a considerable setup since
there is not much point in authenticating twice. The upper part of 
https://www.dokuwiki.org/tips:httpauth-passthru describes this.

This plugin does it the other way round. It assumes that the web server already
did the authentication and essentially annuls DokuWiki's own authentication by
providing a minimalistic checkPass() method which does not really authenticate.
It merely checks that DokuWiki's idea of username/password equals the HTTP
authentication credentials which should always be the case (except if you did
not enable HTTP authentication in your Webserver).

DokuWiki expects some things that HTTP authentication does not provide and where
the plugin thus has to improvise:
- the user's real name: authhttp will simply return the user's login name here.
  This may not look nice but there's no way of knowing his real name.
- the user's email address: authhttp makes one up by appending a configurable
  domain part to the user's login name. This will generate email addresses that
  will probably not work. There is not really a way around this, so you might
  want to disable email-related functions in DokuWiki.
- the user's groups: authhttp will simply put all users in DokuWiki's
  "defaultgroup". Users whose login names are listed in "specialusers" will
  also be reported to be member of "specialgroup". If you did not modify
  DokuWiki's "superuser" configuration setting default of "@admin", you should
  leave this setting at "admin" as well and put users supposed to be admins in
  "specialusers".

If these limitations are not acceptable, you might want to combine authhttp
with https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:authsplit. authhttp comes with an action
plugin that improves integration with authsplit:
- When authhttp is the primary auth plugin for authsplit, there could be the
  case that while users are known to authhttp, they aren't to the secondary auth
  plugin yet, so they'd have to register (unless authsplit's "autocreate_users"
  feature is used). In this scenario, the username for registration should match
  the HTTP authentication username. Also, the login form should be hidden
  because there is not much sense in offering a form-based login when HTTP
  authentication is used. authhttp's action plugin takes care of all that.
- When authhttp is used on its own, ie. without authsplit, users are ALWAYS
  logged in and "registered", so authhttp's action plugin won't have a visible
  effect.


INSTALLATION

Download the latest version from https://github.com/pief/authhttp/zipball/master
and rename the extracted directory to "authhttp", otherwise the plugin won't
work.

Please refer to http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugins for additional info
on how to install plugins in DokuWiki.


CONFIGURATION AND SETTINGS

- emaildomain: The domain to append to login names to generate email addresses.
- specialusers: The login names of users to be put in the special group. You can
  list multiple login names separated by Space.
- specialgroup: The name of the special group.

Note: when authhttp is used together with authsplit and authhttp is the primary
auth plugin for authsplit, all three configuration settings above will have no
effect any longer due to the way authsplit works.


REFERENCES

Visit the DokuWiki plugin page at

  https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:authhttp

To follow development more closely, clone the GitHub repo at

  https://github.com/pief/authhttp.git


CREDITS

This plugin in based on ideas in the "ggauth" auth backend by Grant Gardner
<[email protected]>, https://www.dokuwiki.org/auth:ggauth. Grant does
not actively maintain ggauth anymore, so an update for the new auth plugins
concept is unlikely. Also, his "http" auth backend uses trustExternal() which
eg. does not support group memberships if used on its own, ie. without the
ggauth "split" auth backend.