At the Forge - Integrating OpenID

The past few months, we've looked at two different ways to authenticate users coming to a Web site. First, we looked at OpenID, an increasingly popular distributed authentication system. With OpenID, users control their information, as well as which applications are allowed to use that information.

Last month, we looked at acts_as_authenticated, a plugin for the Ruby on Rails framework that is quite traditional, asking visitors to enter a user name and password in order to access restricted services.

This month, we take an initial look at how we might be able to incorporate OpenID—and by extension, a combination of OpenID and traditional authentication—into our own Rails applications. In OpenID lingo, we want our application to be a “consumer”, asking an OpenID “provider” of the user's choosing for authentication information, rather than gathering and checking that information ourselves.

OpenID is a pretty well established standard, and integration into a Rails application isn't all that difficult. However, the number of OpenID-supporting libraries and plugins has gotten a bit out of control, such that it's sometimes hard to know (or believe) which ones actually work, not to mention which ones are easiest to work with.

Authenticating users for a Web site is normally a straightforward task. You ask users, via an HTML form, to enter their user names and passwords, and then compare that combination against the database. (For security purposes, of course, it's usually best to encrypt the password in the database, and then compare the encrypted input with what is in the database.) If the user name/password combination exists in the database, the user can log in.

Of course, HTTP is a stateless protocol, which means there isn't really any such thing as being “logged in”. Rather, we rely on cookies, pieces of data provided by the server but stored in the user's browser, which are passed to the server with each subsequent HTTP request. In this system, logging in takes place when the server sets a cookie on the user's browser. In Rails and many other Web frameworks, cookies also are used to keep track of a user's “session”, attributes associated with this user on this browser.

In order to incorporate OpenID into a Web application, we don't need to replace the whole cookie/session/login portion of the framework. Rather, we need to change the way we authenticate users, setting the login cookie after an OpenID provider has indicated that a user has been identified legitimately.

A traditional Rails-based login system would involve an HTML form, a controller action that compares the submitted form values against a database, and then a login page. To replace this with OpenID, we need to modify our controller such that it asks an OpenID server to authenticate the user.

But, wait a second. The whole point of OpenID is that users enter a URL (that is, their unique OpenID), and that they authenticate against a server associated with that URL. This means the HTML form needs to change, such that it asks for a URL instead of a user name and password.

Moreover, we have to take into account the fact that our server needs to redirect users to an OpenID server, which then will redirect back to our system, indicating whether the user has logged in successfully.

There are, as I indicated above, many Ruby- and Rails-related resources having to do with OpenID. Unfortunately, many of them are poorly documented, out of date or relatively hard to use. For example, there is a Ruby gem called openid_login and a plugin called open_id_authentication that might well work with a bit of hacking. But, their documentation is out of date, and I encountered problems with, among other things, the double suffixes (.html.erb) that Rails now uses with templates. So, although I'm sure it's possible to get this gem to work with OpenID and modern Rails installations, it probably will take time and effort—more than I would expect from a prepackaged solution.

Thus, my suggested solution to the whole question of OpenID is to use the simple, low-level ruby-openid gem, which happens to have support for Rails applications built in. This gem is actually very well documented in its current form—version 2.0.4 at the time of this writing. But, be careful; much of the documentation you'll find on-line is out of date and implements OpenID-related functionality using the 1.x version of this gem with an older, incompatible API.

To install the gem, of course, we write:

gem install ruby-openid

We then create a controller for handling our OpenID-related actions:

script/generate controller openid new create complete openid_consumer

These four actions, the fourth of which is private, are what we'll need in order for people to log in with OpenID.

Now we can create an HTML form in a view; I created this simple view as login.html.erb within views/openid/new.html.erb:

<html>
<head>
    <title>Log in with OpenID</title>
</head>
<body>
    <% if not flash[:error].blank? %>
        <p><b><%= flash[:error] -%></b></p>
    <% end %>

    <% form_tag "/openid/create" do %>
      <%= text_field_tag "openid_url" %>
      <%= submit_tag "Log in with OpenID" %>
    <% end %>
</body>
</html>

Because everything between <% and %> in an ERb template is evaluated as Ruby code, we'll need to understand what is going on here. First, we create a form that is not connected to any object using the form_tag helper. (If the form were connected to an object, we would simply use the form helper.) We give it a URL of /openid, which we will discuss in a little bit, when we look at routing.

The form contains a single text field, whose name and id attributes both will be set to openid_url. Modern browsers recognize this name and use it to fill in an OpenID URL automatically. A submit button and a closing end tag complete the form.