Fedora relies on its servlet container to provide authentication. User credentials are configured in your web application container, usually in a properties file or XML file. This document describes how to set up Fedora and either Tomcat or Jetty to enable HTTP Basic Authentication, using simple user files. Consult your web application server documentation for other ways to configure and manage users. Fedora can handle any user principal passed to it by the servlet container, as provisioned by any of the container's supported authentication mechanisms.

Container Roles

Fedora uses two container roles to determine its authorization behavior. The superuser role is fedoraAdmin. Users with this role are not subject to any further authorization checks, and thus can perform any operations on the repository. This is comparable to the fedoraAdmin superuser role in Fedora 3, used for Fedora 3 API-M operations. The regular user role is fedoraUser. Users with this role are subject to authorization checks by the Web Access Control system. The exact permissions any regular user has are determined per request by looking at the effective ACL of the requested resource, the requesting user's security principals, and the nature of the request (HTTP method, content-type, etc.).

Configure Container Users and Roles

Jetty

• Create a $JETTY_BASE/etc/jetty-users.properties file.  This file contains entries in the format username:  password [, role, ...], where
  • username is the user's login id (the principal)
  • password is the user's password
  • role is the servlet role they are assigned upon login;  jetty allows you to specify any number of roles (or no role at all).
• Sample jetty-users.properties file that contains three users, two of whom are regular users, and the third of whom (fedoraAdmin) is a Fedora superuser:

testuser: password1,fedoraUser
adminuser: password2,fedoraUser
fedoraAdmin: fedoraAdmin,fedoraAdmin

• Configure your Jetty login realm.
  

  • Standalone: Modify your $JETTY_BASE/webapp/fcrepo.xml file to configure the login realm and include the jetty-users.properties file:

    <Configure class="org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">   <!-- Set this to the webapp root of your Fedora repository --> <Set name="contextPath">/</Set> <!-- Set this to the path of of fcrepo4 WAR file -->   <Set name="war"><SystemProperty name="jetty.base" default="."/>/webapps/fcrepo.war</Set> <Get name="securityHandler"> <Set name="loginService"> <New class="org.eclipse.jetty.security.HashLoginService"> <Set name="name">fcrepo</Set> <!-- Set this to the path to your jetty-users.properties file -->  <Set name="config"><SystemProperty name="jetty.base" default="."/>/etc/jetty-users.properties</Set> </New> </Set> </Get> </Configure>

    
    

  • Embedded in Maven: The fcrepo-webapp Maven project includes jetty-maven-plugin. The property jetty.users.file sets the location of the jetty-users.properties file. Run the fcrepo-webapp server with the following system property:

-Djetty.users.file=/path/to/jetty-users.properties

• See the Jetty Authentication documentation for more details. 

Tomcat

• Create or edit your $CATALINA_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml file.  It has entries of the form
  

   <user name="principal" password="password" roles="role1, role2, ..." />

  where:

  • name is the user's login id (the principal)
  • password is the user's password
  • roles are the servlet roles they are assigned upon login;  tomcat allows you to specify any number of roles (or no role at all).

  Sample tomcat-users.xml file that contains three users, two of whom are regular users, and the third of whom (fedoraAdmin) is a Fedora superuser:

  <tomcat-users> <role rolename="fedoraUser" /> <role rolename="fedoraAdmin" /> <user name="testuser" password="password1" roles="fedoraUser" /> <user name="adminuser" password="password2" roles="fedoraUser" /> <user name="fedoraAdmin" password="fedoraAdmin" roles="fedoraAdmin" /> </tomcat-users>

  
  

• Configure your Tomcat login realm. Modify your file $CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml file to configure the login realm with the Fedora webapp context:

  <Context> ... <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase" /> ... </Context>

  
  

• See the Tomcat Realms documentation for more details.