package ocsigenserver

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Module Authbasic: Basic HTTP Authentication.

type auth = string -> string -> bool Lwt.t

This module implements Basic HTTP Authentication as described in RFC 2617. It can be used to add an authentication layer to sites with no built-in authentication (e.g. static files). Beware, passwords are transmitted in cleartext with this scheme, so the medium should be secured somehow (by e.g. SSL).

This module implements only the HTTP-related part of the protocol, and is meant to be extended with various authentication schemes. A very naive one (authentication with a single user/password, given in the configuration file) is provided.

val register_basic_authentication_method : (Xml.xml -> auth) -> unit

This function registers an authentication plugin: it adds a new parser to the list of available authentication schemes.

This is only applied if you are running the server with an XML configuration file. Use the realm, auth variables otherwise.

A parser takes as argument an XML tree (corresponding to the first son of an <authbasic> element in the configuration file) and returns an authentication function f. f will be called for each request with the supplied user and password and should return (cooperatively) a boolean telling whether access is granted or not. Exceptions are handled the same way as for extension parsers.

The <authbasic> element must have a realm attribute, giving some identifier to the resource which is protected (several resources on the same hostname can share the same realm). This gives a general customization scheme "for free" from the point of view of plugin developers and is totally transparent to the plugin.

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