Fedora 4 uses servlet container authentication (Realms) to provide minimal protection for your repository, including the set up of "superuser" accounts.  User credentials are configured in your web application container, usually in a properties file or XML file. By configuring superuser accounts you can require authentication for all management (write) operations.  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.

The superuser role is fedoraAdmin.  This is comparable to the fedoraAdmin superuser role in Fedora 3, used for Fedora 3 API-M operations.

The Fedora authorization modules reside in separate source code modules from the core Fedora web-application.

As a result, each release includes pre-built Fedora "webapp-plus" war files that have the authorization modules included. You are recommended to use one of these "webapp-plus" war files as a starting point for having an authorization-enabled deployment.

You can then follow the guidelines in the Best Practices - Fedora Configuration document to specify site-specific "repo.xml" and "repository.json" configurations, as further described below.

  1. Configure your repo.xml file

    Add the beans authenticationProvider and fad to your repo.xml file, and make the modeshapeRepofactory bean dependent on authenticationProvider.  Use the class org.fcrepo.auth.ServletContainerAuthenticationProvider as your authentication provider.  Here is an example repo.xml that configures authentication and authorization using the Basic Roles authorization delegate.

    To specify a local repo.xml configuration, provide the system property as follows:

    JAVA_OPTS="... -Dfcrepo.spring.repo.configuration=file:/local/repo.xml"


    <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
    xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util.xsd">

    <!-- Context that supports the actual ModeShape JCR itself -->

    <context:annotation-config/>

    <bean name="modeshapeRepofactory"
        class="org.fcrepo.kernel.impl.spring.ModeShapeRepositoryFactoryBean"
        p:repositoryConfiguration="${fcrepo.modeshape.configuration:classpath:/config/servlet-auth/repository.json}"
        depends-on="authenticationProvider"/>

    <bean class="org.modeshape.jcr.JcrRepositoryFactory"ModeShapeEngine" init-method="start"/>

    <bean id="connectionManager" class="org.apache.http.impl.conn.PoolingHttpClientConnectionManager" />

    <!-- Optional PrincipalProvider that will inspect the request header, "some-header", for user role values -->
    <bean name="headerProvider" class="org.fcrepo.auth.common.HttpHeaderPrincipalProvider">
        <property name="headerName" value="some-header"/>
        <property name="separator" value=","/>
    </bean>

    <util:set id="principalProviderSet">
        <ref bean="headerProvider"/>
    </util:set>

    <bean name="fad" class="org.fcrepo.auth.roles.basic.BasicRolesAuthorizationDelegate"/>

    <bean name="authenticationProvider" class="org.fcrepo.auth.common.ServletContainerAuthenticationProvider">
        <property name="fad" ref="fad"/>
        <property name="principalProviders" ref="principalProviderSet"/>
    </bean>

    <!-- For the time being, load annotation config here too -->
    <bean class="org.fcrepo.metrics.MetricsConfig"/>
</beans>


  2. Configure your repository.json file

    Modify the security section to enable both authenticated (via authentication provider) and internal sessions between Fedora and ModeShape. 

    To specify a local repository.json configuration, provide the system property as follows:

    JAVA_OPTS="... -Dfcrepo.modeshape.configuration=file:/local/repository.json"

    It should contain a "security" element that matches this block:

    "security" : {        
        "anonymous" : {
            "roles" : ["readonly","readwrite","admin"],
            "useOnFailedLogin" : false
        },
        "providers" : [
            { "classname" : "org.fcrepo.auth.common.ServletContainerAuthenticationProvider" }
        ]
    },


  3. Configure your web.xml

    Configure your web.xml.

    Modify fcrepo-webapp/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml by uncommenting the security configuration

      <!--Uncomment section below to enable Basic-Authentication-->
  <security-constraint>
    <web-resource-collection>
      <web-resource-name>Fedora4</web-resource-name>
      <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
      <http-method>DELETE</http-method>
      <http-method>PUT</http-method>
      <http-method>HEAD</http-method>
      <http-method>OPTIONS</http-method>
      <http-method>PATCH</http-method>
      <http-method>GET</http-method>
      <http-method>POST</http-method>
    </web-resource-collection>
    <auth-constraint>
      <role-name>fedoraUser</role-name>
      <role-name>fedoraAdmin</role-name>
    </auth-constraint>
    <user-data-constraint>
      <transport-guarantee>NONE</transport-guarantee>
    </user-data-constraint>
  </security-constraint>
  <login-config>
    <auth-method>BASIC</auth-method>
    <realm-name>fcrepo</realm-name>
  </login-config>


    The "auth-constraint" element must contain the roles defined as your users (see below for jetty and tomcat).


  4. Configure your web application container

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

See the Jetty Authentication documentation for more details.