Basic Authentication for Camping

This week I wrote a small web tool in Camping but when I wanted to secure it a little bit I noticed that there was no default way to do HTTP basic authentication. So I wrote some code to do just that. Actually I wrote a lot of documentation and a little bit of code.

With just some downloading and three simple steps you can add basic authentication to you application.

Download the basic_authentication.rb file.

1. require 'basic_authentication'
2. Mixin the BasicAuth module:

   module Blog
     include Camping::BasicAuth
   end

3. Define how you want to authenticate users:

   module Blog
     def authenticate(u, p)
       [u,p] == ['admin','secret']
     end
     module_function :authenticate
   end

And you’re ready to start not letting people into you application. If anyone has a better idea on how and where to define the authenticate method, please drop me a line.

You can use this code under the same restrictions as the Camping framework. Now let’s just hope Why doesn’t sue me for using the Camping module (:

Update: Thijs found a bug in the header handling. The link above has been updated. I will try to give this code a home somewhere and some proper version information when I have some time.