[rabbitmq-discuss] Announcing: rabbitmq-proxyauth: A RabbitMQ Proxy Authentication patch/Plugin

Mon Jul 26 10:44:27 BST 2010

Scott,

On 22/07/10 05:11, Scott Brooks wrote:
> TLDR: proof of concept patch to rabbitmq-server, plugin, and ruby
> backend to authenticate users.
> http://github.com/Blaze74/rabbit_proxyauth
> http://github.com/Blaze74/proxyauth.rb

some comments on the server patch:

1) I'd prefer if this dealt with authentication only, not also 
authorisation. The latter is very rabbit-specific and likely to change 
in the future.

2) Your rabbit_access_control_proxy module should have an API that 
performs the gen_server calls, i.e. the interface to it should be a set 
of functions (e.g. authenticate(User, Pass) -> boolean()), not a set of 
gen_server messages. That's a general OTP design principle.

3) The authentication backend should be configurable via an 
"authentication_module" app env var, and the default setting should 
point to a module which refuses all authentication requests (i.e. 
returns 'false' in the authenticate/2 call).

The objective of 2 and 3 is to allow a plug-in to override the default 
setting for the authentication_module with a conforming alternative 
implementation. For an example of how to structure 2 and 3 (including 
behaviour definitions, spec files etc) take a look at the 
backing_queue_module setting in 'default'.

Regards,

Matthias.