Web publishing system with Apache and Subversion – part 3

Authorization

The previous posts were covering setup and authentication. But definitely you would like special rules for different groups and modules in your organization. It is not uncommon that a different group of developers will work on different module(s).

For this you have to use the mod_authz_svn module that comes with the Subversion module and activate it by adding the below line at the beginning of <apache-dir>/conf/extra/wps.conf:


LoadModule authz_svn_module modules/mod_authz_svn.so


Then to configure the access policy you have to add to every <Location> section that defines Subversion repositories:


AuthzSVNAccessFile "/wps/svnaccess.conf"


where /wps/svnaccess.conf is the file holding your access policy.

I will try now to explain the syntax and semantic of this access policy file using a small example:

[groups]
admins = admin1, admin2
web-developers = john, marry
backstage-developers = harry, sally

[/]
* = 
@admins = rw

[web:/]
@web-developers = rw
@backstage-developers = r
editor = rw

[stage:/]
@web-developers = rw
@backstage-developers = rw

You can see that the file is an usual properties files divided in sections, each section beginning with [<section-title>] and ending at the beginning of the next section. The first section defines the groups of users. The users in group are comma separated. It is obvious that john and marry are web developers and there are two administrators (admin1, admin2).

The following sections describes access rules to repositories and directories. The section title has the format repository:path and it specifies a rule for the given path inside the repository. If you don’t specify a repository or a path it will define the rules for all (repositories/paths). Inside these sections every line describing an access rule has the format

username = permissions

or

@groupname = permissions

If the username is *, then it refers to all the users.
The permission can be an empty string for granting no permission, r for reading, w for writing and rw for reading/writing.

Taking into account all this you can see that by default nobody has access to the repositories and administrators have read/write access to everything. Further on, the backstage developers have read access to the website and read/write access to the backstage environment.

More information on these you can find on the SVN book in the section Per-Directory Access Control.

Backstage environment

You already saw that I used the term backstage. This refers to a website with access only for the internal users that it is used for reviewing purposes. Before putting something on your website you may want to be reviewed by certain groups and modified accordingly. Of course we will also have a corresponding Subversion repository as for the main website.

So we will do the same creation of the Subversion repository, create the directory for the web folder, checkout the repository, add the hook and configure Apache. I will only explain here how to write the configuration for Apache, as this is a little bit different because it should be only accessible for internal users. Practically you will add the same authentication configuration as for the Subversion repositories.

<Directory "/wps/backstage">
    AllowOverride None
    Options None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    
    AuthName "Backstage Authentication"
    Require valid-user
    # for basic authentication
    AuthType basic
    AuthUserFile /wps/passwd
</Directory>

Alias /backstage /wps/backstage
ScriptAlias /backstage/cgi-bin/ 
        "/wps/backstage/cgi-bin/"

#
# Use name-based virtual hosting.
#
NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin administrator@domain.com
    DocumentRoot "/wps/backstage"
    ServerName backstage.domain.com
    ServerAlias www.backstage.domain.com
    ErrorLog "logs/backstage.log"
    
    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/wps/backstage/cgi-bin/"
</VirtualHost>

Conclusions

If we go back to the first post from this series then you can see that we met all the requirements for the desired web publishing system. It is free, OS independent and can be easily installed and setup (a few hours even for the very junior administrators).
The authentication and authorization mechanism can be customized to a very high degree to meet your needs.
Web developers can easily access the Subversion repository using TortoiseSVN. Or even from Dreamweaver (although this extension isn’t free and I haven’t tested it).
If you also install websvn, you will RSS feeds for all the changes made to your website.
And, most importantly, you have all the versioning system advantages brought to your website.

Part 1 – Part 2

Download configuration files.

Web publishing system with Apache and Subversion – part 2

If you read the first part of this post, you probably know by now how to install and configure a web publishing system using only Apache and Subversion. But your system will miss one of the most important thing: authentication. So let’s get started and tackle this.

Authentication

We kept all the Apache configuration settings related to Subversion and the website in the file <apache-dir>/conf/extra/wps.conf and further on we will modify this file.
Remember the below section located either in the main server or in a virtual one section?

<Location /svn >

    DAV svn
    SVNParentPath /wps/svnrepo
    SVNListParentPath On

</Location>

We will modify this one to add authentication and authorization.

<Location /svn >

    DAV svn
    SVNParentPath /wps/svnrepo
    SVNListParentPath On

    AuthType basic
    AuthName "SVN repository"
    AuthUserFile /wps/passwd
    Require valid-user

</Location>

The user database will be kept in the plain text file /wps/passwd. To add or modify users you can use the htpasswd utility. So let’s add a developer account:


htpasswd -c /wps/passwd developer


You will be prompted for the password. Later on you can change it with:


htpasswd /wps/passwd developer


.

There are also some other ways to authenticate users, by keeping the users in a database file or using LDAP. You have to specify the authentication provider and use the specific module settings: mod_authn_file, mod_authn_dbm,
mod_authn_dbd,
and mod_authnz_ldap.

Windows authentication

You can also use Windows domain authentication, but this will require just a little bit more work from your side. Anyway this may come in handy in some big organizations, where you don’t want to create special accounts only for this and enable users to use their usual Windows logon credentials.

First of all you have to download the SSPI authentication module and copy it to <apache-dir>/modules. Then add the following line at the beginning of <apache-dir>/conf/extra/wps.conf:

LoadModule sspi_auth_module modules/mod_auth_sspi.so

and the below lines to the Location section corresponding to the SVN repository:

    AuthName "Windows Authentication"
    AuthType SSPI
    SSPIAuth On
    SSPIAuthoritative On
    # set the domain to authorize against
    SSPIDomain your.windows.domain
    # keep domain name in userid string
    SSPIOmitDomain On 
    SSPIUsernameCase lower
    SSPIOfferBasic On 
    # basic authentication shouldn't 
    # have higher priority
    SSPIBasicPreferred Off 

    Require valid-user

Now lets’ discuss in a little bit more in detail the above configuration settings:

• SSPIAuth – this will turn on/off the Windows authentication module
• SSPIAuthoritative – this will turn on/off if the the Windows authentication is mandatory or if other modules can be used as a fallback
• SSPIDomain – the IP address or name of your windows domain controller against which the authentication is run
• SSPIOmitDomain – if it is On then the domain name is omitted from the user name; so if the user is DOMAIN\user, the user name for Apache and Subversion will actually be user and not DOMAIN\user.
• SSPIUsernameCase – tells how the user name letter cases are converted. The possible values are lower and upper. If this is not specify then no conversion is made. If you specify lower (recommended) then the user name DOMAIN\User will be transformed to domain\user (if you also specify SSPIOmitDomain On, then the name will become user)
• SSPIOfferBasic – SSPI by default uses NTLM, a Microsoft proprietary protocol which only IE (and other Windows components/application) understand, so they are able to authenticate you automatically. If you set SSPIOfferBasic On means that it is still authenticating against your Windows domain on the backend, but when it asks the client for a password, it does so using standard HTTP Basic authentication. So if you plan to use other clients to your Subversion repository than IE you must set this on and the client then will prompt you for the domain name and password. This is definately needed if you use TortoiseSVN.
• SSPIBasicPreferred – if it is On then basic authentication will have higher priority

The authentication possibilities are endless and are depending only on your imagination and needs. I was focusing on these two types as they will probably appear more often: basic in a low or mid-size company and Windows authentication can be smoothly integrated in a big company infrastructure with Windows desktops for the big part of users.

Authorization, setting up a second repository and conclusions will follow soon.

Part 1 – Part 3

Download configuration files.

Web publishing system with Apache and Subversion – part 1

Introduction

What does a versioning system have to do with the web and more specifically with a publishing system?

When developing small websites (mainly presentation ones) you usually don’t need a versioning system. This post will come very handy to you if you work on a bigger team developing an enterprise (not necessarily, presentation) website. There a versioning system is clearly needed: user concurrency, history backup, a central repository, basically the main features of such a system.

I have chosen Subversion as the concurrent versioning system, not only as being the latest in style , but also for some features which makes it perfect, easy to use and easy to setup. In a few words we want a web publishing system that:

• mandatory: is free
• mandatory: is easy to setup for administrators
• mandatory: is very easy to use for (web) developers
• mandatory: features versions for the web pages, so you will be able to see changes in time and revert to previous versions
• mandatory: provides an authentication and authorization system
• nice to have: the authorization system can be configured per module, meaning that different groups of developers can have read/write access to different sections of the website
• nice to have: able to send notifications every time a web page is modified
• nice to have: is customizable and able to perform specific tasks whenever a change is made (add/edit/delete web pages)
• nice to have: running on multiple OSes

Taking all this into account, what is the solution? I will continue by describing the steps how to setup and use such a system.

Installation

First of all, download and install Apache 2.2 and Subversion. The installation is very easy and I will not enter here in any details (there are even binary packages, aka installers, for all the main operating systems:) ).

Configuration

Now let’s get to the server configuration. For the sake of the example, let’s suppose that we will use the /wps or c:\wps (for Windows) folder for the entire thing. We will create the svnrepo subfolder as a parent for all Subversion repositories and then create a Subversion repository for the website using the svnadmin command:

svnadmin create /wps/svnrepo/web

or in Windows

svnadmin create c:\wps\svnrepo\web

Let’s go now and configure Apache so that you can access Subversion repository through it. We don’t use the lightweight svnserve standalone server because we already have Apache installed as a web server. The configuration steps are:

1. Copy the files mod_dav_svn.so and mod_authz_svn.so from <svn-dir>/bin to <apache-dir>/modules, where <svn-dir> is the Subversion installation directory and <apache-dir> is the Apache installation directory (usually C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2 in Windows).
2. Add the following line to the Apache configuration file <apache-dir>conf/httpd.conf:
   

   Include conf/extra/wps.conf

3. Create and edit with your favorite text editor the file <apache-dir>conf/extra/wps.conf.Paste the below content into:
   

   LoadModule dav_svn_module 
     modules/mod_dav_svn.so
   LoadModule authz_svn_module 
     modules/mod_authz_svn.so
   
   <IfModule dav_svn_module>
   # if the module was loaded succesfully
   
   # to exclude SVN files from web published folders
   <Directory ~ "/.svn">
       Order allow,deny
       Deny from all
   </Directory>
   
   # if you want a virtual host for Subversion
   <VirtualHost *:80>
       ServerAdmin administrator@domain.com
       ServerName svn.domain.com
       
       <Location / >
           DAV svn
           SVNParentPath /wps/svnrepo
           SVNListParentPath On
       </Location>
       
       ErrorLog "logs/wps.log"
   </VirtualHost>
   
   # the Subversion folder
   <Location /svn >
   
       DAV svn
       SVNParentPath /wps/svnrepo
       SVNListParentPath On
   
   </Location>
   

If you restart your Apache web server you will be able to access the SVN repository at http://domain.com/svn/web or at http://svn.domain.com/web.

Now we will create a web folder to host the website files and then checkout the web repository into it. Note that if you’re going to use a trunk/tags/branches directory organization (which I definately recommend) in the repository then you should checkout in the web folder only the trunk:

svn checkout http://domain.com/svn/web/trunk /wps/web

As you noticed by now the /wps/web is a working copy of the repository. But checking out the repository is not enough, you have to set up a commit hook to automatically update the working copy every time a change is made. Create a file post-commit in Unix (don’t forget to change the x mode – chmod 775 post-commit) and post-commit.bat in Windows with the following content:

svn update /wps/web

Every time a change is commited into the Subversion repository that change gets into the web directory too. Of course a .svn directory is created under each directory. You don’t have to delete them, the Directory ~ "\.svn" Apache section in wps.conf will deny access to these directories.

Now you have only to add a few lines to wps.conf to enable access to the web folder:

DocumentRoot "/wps/web"
ServerAlias www.domain.com

<Directory "/wps/web">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Note: Please don’t forget to restart Apache every time you change the configuration files.

Now everything should be up and ready. But everyone can commit to your web repository and you definately don’t want this.

In the next parts I will explain how to setup an authentication and authorization system and how to create a second web repository accessible only within your organization.

Part 2 – Part 3

Download configuration files.