3.2.01 Integrating Crowd with Apache

Crowd provides a number of modules that allow you to configure Crowd to authenticate HTTP Authentication requests made to an Apache web server.

The following features are provided:

• Use Crowd to password-protect resources on your website.
• Configure website locations to restrict access to specific Crowd groups or users.

Note: These instructions assume some Unix system and Apache configuration knowledge.

Using Subversion under Apache? Crowd's Subversion connector allows you to password-protect a Subversion repository and provide fine grained access by group or user. Read more.

Prerequisites

• Apache web server version 2.0 or above with the mod_perl module installed and configured.
• The following third-party Perl modules:
  • SOAP::Lite (v0.69 or greater required)
  • Digest::SHA1
  • Error
  • Cache::Cache

Installation and Configuration

The following instructions are for Unix systems. If you're running Apache on Windows, see the notes below.

Installing the Third-Party Perl Modules

Download the required Perl modules from CPAN using the links above and install them as follows:

See http://search.cpan.org/~jhi/perl-5.8.0/pod/perlmodinstall.pod for a detailed description of the various ways of installing Perl modules on your system.

Installing the Crowd Perl Modules

1. Download the three Crowd module files attached to this page:

   Attached file	Description
   Crowd-Apache-Connector-1.2.zip	Crowd authentication, authorisation and perl module for Apache 2

   
   
2. Extract the Crowd-Apache-Connection archive file and install the three modules using the same procedure as for the third party modules.
   
   

   unzip Crowd-Apache-Connector-1.2.zip
   cd Atlassian-Crowd-1.2/
   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make install
   cd ../Apache-CrowdAuth-1.2/
   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make install
   cd ../Apache-CrowdAuthz-1.2/
   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make install
   

Configuring Apache

Ensure that mod_perl is enabled. Your Apache config file should contain a line like the following:

Many common distributions of Apache come with mod_perl preconfigured.

Configuring Authentication

To tell Apache to use Crowd to authenticate requests for a particular location, edit the Apache config file to add the following commands to a <Location> or <Directory> section.

Configuring Authorisation

If you want to restrict access to a certain Directory or Location in your Apache configuration to a subset of Crowd users and/or groups, add the following lines to your configuration:

Note:

• Typically, only one of the CrowdAllowedUsers or CrowdAllowedGroups would be needed for a particular location. You can define both. If you do, then access is granted if either is satisfied.
• If the CrowdCacheEnabled setting is on, then authorisation checks are cached in order to increase performance. This means that changes to group membership in Crowd may not be reflected immediately in user access.

Troubleshooting

The CrowdAuth module logs detailed output if the Apache LogLevel parameter is set to info or debug. This can be useful in diagnosing problems.

Installing Perl, mod_perl and Perl Modules on Windows

Setting up CrowdAuth on an Apache instance running on Windows requires that some things be done differently. The following instructions assume you are using ActivePerl as your Perl environment.

• If you don't already have a Perl interpreter installed, you'll need one. The following instructions assume an install of ActiveState's ActivePerl.
• Windows installations of Apache are less likely to come with mod_perl pre-installed. A Win32 version of mod_perl in PPM format is available here.
• The .tar.gz format used to distribute CrowdAuth (and other modules) is supported by most modern Windows archiving utilities (WinZip, for example).
• The make utility used to build the Perl modules is not part of a Windows. nmake, Microsoft's equivalent, is available as a self-extracting archive here.

Installing Perl Modules on Windows

The required modules (Digest::SHA1, Error, Cache::FileCache, SOAP:Lite) are available through the Perl Package Manager utility.

CrowdAuth needs a newer version of SOAP::Lite than is supplied with ActivePerl (0.69 vs 0.55). A prebuilt ppm of the correct version can be installed from the University of Winnipeg's repository using the following command:

C:\>ppm install http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/SOAP-Lite.ppd

Installing Apache::CrowdAuth on Windows

Extract Apache-CrowdAuth-0.06.zip using Winzip or equivalent...
cd Apache-CrowdAuth-0.06
perl Makefile.PL
nmake
nmake install

When editing the httpd.conf file and adding the mod_perl.so module to Apache, you may need to add the following line above the LoadModule line:

LoadFile "C:/Perl/bin/perl58.dll"
LoadModule perl_module modules/mod_perl.so

This LoadFile line points to the perl58.dll in your Perl install directory.

Related Topics

• 3.1 Using the Application Browser
• 3.2 Adding an Application
  • 3.2.01 Integrating Crowd with Apache
  • 3.2.02 Integrating Crowd with Subversion
  • 3.2.03 Integrating Crowd with Atlassian Confluence
    • 3.2.3.1 Configuring Confluence for NTLM SSO
  • 3.2.04 Integrating Crowd with Atlassian CrowdID
  • 3.2.05 Integrating Crowd with Atlassian FishEye
    • Configuring FishEye 1.3.x to talk to Crowd
  • 3.2.06 Integrating Crowd with Atlassian JIRA
    • 3.2.6.1 Configuring JIRA for NTLM SSO
  • 3.2.07 Integrating Crowd with Jive Forums
    • 3.2.7.1 Jive SSO
  • 3.2.08 Integrating Crowd with Atlassian Bamboo
  • 3.2.09 Integrating Crowd with Acegi Security
    • Integrating AppFuse - a Crowd-Acegi Integration Tutorial
  • 3.2.10 Integrating Crowd with Atlassian Crucible
  • 3.2.11 Integrating Crowd with a Custom Application
• 3.3 Mapping a Directory to an Application
  • 3.3.1 Specifying the Directory Order for an Application
  • 3.3.2 Specifying an Application's Directory Permissions
    • Example of Directory Permissions
• 3.4 Specifying which Groups can access an Application
• 3.5 Specifying an Application's Address or Hostname
• 3.6 Testing a User's Login to an Application
• 3.7 Managing an Application's Session
• 3.8 Deleting or Deactivating an Application

Crowd 1.2 Documentation