[rt-users] External Authentication: HowTo - Help needed.

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 23:32, Manfred Koroschetz wrote:
> I would like to use external Authentication for RT in order to be able
> to use it within a "Intranet" environment. Authentication is done
> through PHP authentication against a Postgres DB. RT runs un the same
> server using Postgres as well. I am using RT 3.4.2
>  
> So far I understand the following:
>  
> 1. in RT_SiteConfig.pm set: Set($WebExternalAuth , 1);
> 2. During the PHP login on the intranet I set "Remote_User"
> environment variable to the name of the user logging in. This user
> actually exists in RT and has rights.
> 3. I call the RT url, and I should automatically be logged in and
> presented with the usual RT Homepage.
> 
> The problem is that it does not work. All I get is the login page,
> without the actual fields where to put the login name and password.

Web requests are stateless.  Setting Remote_User in a PHP page isn't
going to affect subsequent requests to other pages.  If you use
http basic authentication the login appears to 'stick' because the
brower automatically resends the credentials on subsequent pages in
the same authentication domain.  Web application frameworks often use
their own login concepts with cookies or rewritten URLs to make the
browser send back a token that can be used to retrieve prior state on
the server side - but you'll have to do a lot of work to integrate this
between php and a perl app.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com