hub/beast/typo integration

Hi:

I am wondering if there are any writeup on how you guys did the single-sign-on to so many apps! Really well done. I followed the announcement in beast mailing list but I was looking for a some info about how did you solve the issue. Is there any blog post or something about it.

I would appreciate your feedback.

Hi – I replied to an e-mail about this on Friday night, coincidentally. I’ve not finished the writeup but in fact I’m just about to post an interim version of it to this site’s Wiki…

...And it’s how here:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2fek5w

It’s missing some info still and at the moment only talks about running multiple Rails applications from a single domain, since that’s the first step required for integration with Hub, our single sign-on application.

More information coming soon! :-)

I’ve updated the Wiki article. Again, I’ll focus on the Hub integration more when I get the time. You may wish to download the Hub tarballs from this site to get some idea of the back-end in the mean time:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/ywn75k

Basically, Hub is the single sign-on application which manages the database of user accounts. People log in, sign up and so-on with Hub, so you’ve already seen it in action when you got your own account.

Then there’s the Hub Gem. This talks to a DRb (Distributed Ruby) server to fetch log in details stored there by the Hub application (also through the same Gem). Individual applications just include the Hub Gem and become SSO-aware without needing a secondary database connection for users, some kind of ad hoc secure user data in cookies (beyond storing a unique key to identify the DRb server’s user object), or anything like that. In fact applications are isolated from the back-end user management by the Gem more or less completely.

Application modification in the simple cases boils down to just adding a before_filter and a bit of setup code that specifies the user privileges needed for each action in any controllers that you want to protect. In cases where applications already have a strongly embedded sense of their own users, you need to take different steps; Beast and RForum were examples. I’ll go into that in more detail either in the Wiki link mentioned above or in the Hub documentation. The latter will eventually appear here:

http://pond.org.uk/ruby/hub/

Thank you so much! I am going to re-create the things that you mention on the post locally but with apache and mongrel.. Currently going through the write-up.

I am probably jumping to the gun here .. but just can’t stop thinking about it.. what are the downside of this strategy i.e. single sign-on .. all good thing must have bad things :-) no no just kidding its been bugging me a lot that i can only have 1 rails app.. cool. Thanks again.. I will be back with more question.. should I post it here or under pond.org.uk forum?

Cheers

all good thing must have bad things

Well, if you only have to sign on once to have standard level read/write access to all site applications, you only have to crack the site once to do the same thing.

I will be back with more question.. should I post it here or under pond.org.uk forum?

Here is fine, to save you having to sign up to an ever increasing number of forums.

After a long delay, I’ve added in a lot of Hub documentation. There are still some missing bits – notably the Hub internal API. All that’s going to be is a prettier version of the comments already present in the Hub gem source anyway, though.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/3cg9aa

There are more updates to both Hub documentation (now located in its proper location) and the “subdirectory Rails” stuff. The latter just needs the server configuration information adding while the Hub documents have a chunk of API description left to fill in.

I’ve now finished the “subdirectory Rails” document, including full details of server configuration.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2fek5w

Hello.

Ive been having problems with HUB.

gem install hubssolib-0.2.5.gem

Where is the gem?

When i unzip the tar of hubssolib there is no gem inside it so i dont know how to install it. Any help would be great.

Cheers.

The archives contain only sources so you need to build the gem. Go into the source directory, with files VERSION, hubssolib.gemspec and lib, then issue the following command:

gem build hubssolib.gemspec

If you’re using Hub from the ROOL repository you’ll get the one styled for the ROOL site with its reliance on, in particular, shared/fixed_header.rhtml, shared/fixed_sidebar.rhtml and shared/fixed_footer.rhtml. You can find a partial shared tree including static versions of these files in SVN at:

svn://riscosopen.org:25082/rool/rails/shared/trunk

Using this content as an example you should hopefully have little trouble in customising the look and feel for your own site. In time I hope to have a version of Hub on pond.org.uk that doesn’t include such external dependencies and has its own “stand-alone” styles which are more easily adapted for other sites.

I’m assembling a large document that describes in detail how to take the ROOL web site component tarballs and construct your own integrated site based on the same applications. It’ll take a while to finish but already has most of the vital information:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/27opj5