In this quick start, you will create a sample resource and an ACL for that resource, verify that access to that resource is correctly restricted, and finally modify the ACL to allow you to update the resource.

Prerequisites

The commands in this guide assume that your Fedora repository root is http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest.

Steps

Create these two files:

@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>.

<> dc:title "Hello, World!".


@prefix acl: <http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/acl#>.

<#authz> a acl:Authorization;
   acl:accessTo </fcrepo/rest/foo>;
   acl:agent "user1";
   acl:mode acl:Read.


Upload these files into the repository:

curl -X PUT http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest/foo -u admin1:password3 \
    -H "Content-Type: text/turtle" --data-binary @foo.ttl
curl -X PUT http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest/foo/fcr:acl -u admin1:password3 \
    -H "Content-Type: text/turtle" --data-binary @acl.ttl

Now user1 is able to read the resource at http://localhost:8080/rest/foo, but user2 cannot. To test this, try the following two commands:

curl -i http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest/foo -u user1:password1
curl -i http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest/foo -u user2:password2

The first request should succeed with a 200 OK response code, and the second should fail with a 403 Forbidden.

To demonstrate that user1 indeed only has read-only access to foo, we can try updating foo. Create a file named foo.sparql with the following contents:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>

INSERT DATA { <> dc:description "Quick Start with WebAC and Fedora 4" . }

Then run this to attempt to update foo:

curl -i -X PATCH http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest/foo -u user1:password1 \
      -H "Content-Type: application/sparql-update" \
      --data-binary @foo.sparql

This request should fail with a 403 Forbidden response, since user1 has read-only access to foo. To add write access for user1, we will need to update the acl/authz resource as admin. Create a file named authz.sparql with the following contents:

PREFIX acl: <http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/acl#>

INSERT DATA { <#authz> acl:mode acl:Write . }

Run this command to update the ACL authorization:

curl -i -X PATCH http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest/acl/authz -u admin1:password3 \
      -H "Content-Type: application/sparql-update" \
      --data-binary @authz.sparql

If the update to the authorization was successful, you will see a 204 No Content response.

Now you should be able to re-run the earlier command to update the foo resource as user1:

curl -i -X PATCH http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest/foo -u user1:password1 \
      -H "Content-Type: application/sparql-update" \
      --data-binary @foo.sparql

Now this should return a 204 No Content response. To verify that the update happened, you can also go to http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest/foo in your web browser, and confirm that it has both dc:title and dc:description properties.

When creating an ACL to protect the repository root, you must include a trailing slash in the Authorizations's acl:accessTo predicate, otherwise the Authorization will not match the request URI, and won't get applied.

<#rootAuthz> a acl:Authorization;
    acl:accessTo <https://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest> .


<#rootAuthz> a acl:Authorization;
    acl:accessTo <https://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest/> .
    # note this trailing slash ---------------------^