Re: Basic authentication

[Geoffrey Young]

Stephen Hardisty wrote:
Hi,
I'm having a bit of trouble authenticating users. The script I have works, but only a 
couple of times before it just sends out 401 without prompting the user for their 
details. We have mod_perl 1.99_05 installed, we don't want to upgrade as we would have 
more applications to upgrade than time.
Any help/questions would be appreciated. The problem script is below:

use strict;
use Apache::Const qw(OK AUTH_REQUIRED);
use lib qw(/var/www/html/opbms/libs);
use CheckLogin;
use CreateFrames;
my $r = shift;

print "Content-Type:text/html\n\n";
don't do that - AUTH_REQUIRED is an error status, so apache will send it's 
own set of headers.

my ($status, $password) = $r->get_basic_auth_pw;

if ($status != OK)
{
    $r->status($status);
    exit($status);
}
yike!

you shouldn't ever play with $r->status.  calling exit is also not the 
standard way.

examples of auth handlers abound, so you should really just be following 
them - even though you are using mod_perl 2.0, the API is really the same 
wrt get_basic_auth_pw() etc.

some examples include the many, many modules on CPAN.  you can also find 
detailed auth examples in

http://www.modperlcookbook.org/chapters/ch13.pdf

and

http://www.modperlcookbook.org/code/ch13/

specifically

http://www.modperlcookbook.org/code/ch13/Cookbook/Authenticate.pm

HTH

--Geoff