zulip/docs/subsystems/auth.md

Authentication in the development environment

This page documents special notes that are useful for configuring Zulip's various authentication methods for testing in a development environment.

Testing OAuth in development

Among the many authentication methods we support, a server can be configured to allow users to sign in with their Google accounts or GitHub accounts, using the OAuth protocol.

Because these authentication methods involve an interaction between Zulip, an external service, and the user's browser, and particularly because browsers can (rightly!) be picky about the identity of sites you interact with, the preferred way to set them up in a development environment is to set up the real Google and GitHub to process auth requests for your development environment.

The steps to do this are a variation of the steps documented in prod_settings_template.py. Here are the full procedures for dev:

Google

• Visit https://console.developers.google.com and navigate to "APIs & services" > "Credentials". Create a "Project" which will correspond to your dev environment.

• Navigate to "APIs & services" > "Library", and find the "Google+ API". Choose "Enable".

• Return to "Credentials", and select "Create credentials". Choose "OAuth client ID", and follow prompts to create a consent screen, etc. For "Authorized redirect URIs", fill in https://zulipdev.com:9991/accounts/login/google/done/ .

• You should get a client ID and a client secret. Copy them. In dev_settings.py, set GOOGLE_OAUTH2_CLIENT_ID to the client ID, and in dev-secrets.conf, set google_oauth2_client_secret to the client secret.

GitHub

• Register an OAuth2 application with GitHub at one of https://github.com/settings/developers or https://github.com/organizations/ORGNAME/settings/developers. Specify http://zulipdev.com:9991/complete/github/ as the callback URL.

• You should get a page with settings for your new application, showing a client ID and a client secret. In dev_settings.py, set SOCIAL_AUTH_GITHUB_KEY to the client ID, and in dev-secrets.conf, set social_auth_github_secret to the client secret.

When SSL is required

Some OAuth providers (such as Facebook) require HTTPS on the callback URL they post back to, which isn't supported directly by the Zulip development environment. If you run a remote Zulip development server, we have instructions for an nginx reverse proxy with SSL that you can use for your development efforts.

Testing LDAP in development

Before Zulip 2.0, one of the more common classes of bug reports with Zulip's authentication was users having trouble getting LDAP authentication working. The root cause was because setting up a local LDAP server for development was difficult, which meant most developers were unable to work on fixing even simple issues with it.

We solved this problem for our unit tests long ago by using the popular fakeldap library. And in 2018, we added convenient support for using fakeldap in the Zulip development environment as well, so that you can go through all the actual flows for LDAP configuration.

• To enable fakeldap, set FAKE_LDAP_MODE in zproject/dev_settings.py to one of the following options. For more information on these modes, refer to our production docs:

  • a: If users' email addresses are in LDAP and used as username.
  • b: If LDAP only has usernames but email addresses are of the form username@example.com
  • c: If LDAP usernames are completely unrelated to email addresses.

• To disable fakeldap, set FAKE_LDAP_MODE back to None.

• In all fakeldap configurations, users' fake LDAP passwords are equal to their usernames (e.g. for ldapuser1@zulip.com, the password is ldapuser1).

• FAKE_LDAP_NUM_USERS in zproject/dev_settings.py can be used to specify the number of LDAP users to be added. The default value for the number of LDAP users is 8.