Hi, I was setting up Kallithea for our small team, to replace hgweb.cgi installation that didn't cut it anymore, especially when it came to code review. Email + hgweb are very flexible and you can go a surprisingly long way with just that. But they're not enough for tracking which changes are still to be reviewed or integrated.
Since our infrastructure is all Windows, Kallithea had to be installed on Windows Server 2012 R2 (*duck*). I got an experimental installation inside virtualenv up and running fairly quickly. We did evaluation with the team and I proceeded to "production" install. The main thing to solve was making it work with our existing Active Directory accounts. So I made a fatal decision: decided to put Kallithea behind some proxy with Windows Authentication support and configure container auth. That way I hoped to get a single'ish sign-on. My initial attempt was with IIS and ISAPI WSGI. I soon discovered that it meant pywin32 dependency, which is no friend of virtualenv - so there goes virtualenv. Anyway, when everything that had to be installed and configured was finally installed and configured (including ISAPI support in IIS, application pool settings, etc.), all this managed to produce was mysterious death of IIS application pool process whenever a request was sent to it. What made me abandon this track was complete lack of diagnostics: apart from Windows Event Log talking of sudden crash of w3wp.exe - nothing of substance. The crash must be happening quite early in IIS request pipeline, because IIS Failed Request Tracing did not produce anything at all for these failures. I didn't want to bother with crash dump collection and full debugging, so moved on. Second idea was to use Apache for Windows with mod_wsgi and mod_auth_sspi as a substitute for IIS. That seemed promising, especially since I've heard people report success running Kallithea in mod_wsgi. Here I quickly got stuck trying to assemble a matching combination of binaries of Apache 2.4 for Windows + Python 2.7 + mod_wsgi, all compiled against same CRT version and amd64 arch. Since I am not so experienced with Apache, entire idea quickly lost its luster. I briefly considered IIS ARR, which is a sort of reverse proxy, among other things. However, the more I read about it, the more it felt tricky and not well-documented for my use case. Growing a bit desperate, I stumbled upon a reference to IISProxy, which is even mentioned in TurboGears documentation as a way to front TG apps with IIS. I had to add ASP.NET to the Server for it to work, but hey. It turned out to be a very simple device and it actually worked! After figuring out in which environ entry Kallithea receives the user name (it was HTTP_REMOTE_USER, not the normal REMOTE_USER or HTTP_X_FORWARDED_USER), the container auth module successfully created and authenticated user passed by IISProxy. All this with no plaintext credentials in sight, yay. So, anyway... finally I got to the point where my wrong initial assumption became obvious :) - the assumption that Mercurial will authenticate against this setup. But Mercurial client doesn't do Windows Authentication, only Basic. Which (as I immediately remembered) I already discovered 5 years ago while setting up our original hgweb... I still fiddled a bit with IIS Basic Authentication, which validates plaintext credentials against Active Directory, but it didn't work out right away. For some reason Mercurial client got served login page instead of repo data. There was probably some mistake here on my part that could be debugged with a bit of effort, but at this point I was quickly losing steam. Also it looked like a dead-end anyway, because even if it worked I was only getting plaintext auth. So why not remove proxy from the picture and authenticate with AD over LDAP. Here the first hurdle was to get python-ldap binaries for Python 2.7 x64, which, in a moment of weakness, I just grabbed from Gohlke. Then I had to figure out correct LDAP settings. I managed that with the help of documentation, some trial and error and my lucky rabbit foot. I think the key setting for me was "LDAP Filter". Luckily, the Active Directory notes in Kallithea LDAP documentation matched our own "Small Business Server" LDAP layout. The last steps were piece(s) of cake, punching a hole in Windows firewall and making Kallithea an NT Service with the help of wsgisvc. Here I wasn't sure which folders need which permissions, so I left it running under (overpowered) "Local System" account, which is wsgisvc's default. I post this here mainly as a reminder to self to make a documentation PR with a warning "Don't waste your time putting Kallithea behind Windows Authentication". -- Cheers, Konstantin _______________________________________________ kallithea-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sfconservancy.org/mailman/listinfo/kallithea-general
