Fixing authentication to servers without mod_rewrite (Webfaction)

[filipesaraiva]

Hello NextCloud developers, I had this problem since the old times of ownCloud, and all the time when I need to update my ownCloud instance I need to apply this patch. It have the same behavior in NextCloud.

The problem is described here:

The main HTTP authentication examples in the PHP documentation don't work on our servers because we use php-cgi to serve your PHP sites.
The common workarounds for that problem involve setting a HTTP_AUTHENTICATION environment variable via mod_rewrite, but that doesn't work on our servers because our php-cgi environment runs on Apache with suExec, which does not pass environment variables to CGI scripts.

A developer created a patch to solve it. In past I submitted an issue and a pull request with this patch, but a developer talked the best way to fix it is creating an application to provide authentication using a specific method for this case.

Cheers;

[MorrisJobke]

The app basically should do this:

//sett http auth headers for Webfaction workaround
if(isset($_GET['Authorization']) && preg_match('/Basic\s+(.*)$/i', $_GET['Authorization'], $matches))
{
    list($name, $password) = explode(':', base64_decode($matches[1]));
    $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] = strip_tags($name);
    $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] = strip_tags($password);
}

within the appinfo/app.php and specify that it is an authentication app (so it's loaded earlier):

server/apps/user_ldap/appinfo/info.xml

Lines 13 to 15 in 969cfa2

	<types>
	<authentication/>
	</types>

Is this correct @LukasReschke ?

[filipesaraiva]

Does the app need to change the .htaccess too?

[nickvergessen]

No, the app only needs to execute the code from above in it's app.php

[filipesaraiva]

Hi, why did you close it? Was that code added in NextCloud?

[nickvergessen]

No, since it should be an app on it's own