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watchdawg

When using auth_basic module in Nginx, one certain problem is that it lacks session support, but sometimes we just need a simple HTTP basic authentication, rather than other complicated user management system. Thus, this project is to solve this problem, watchdawg offers a simple solution to maintain user sessions, and it also allows the use of existing htpasswd files. Besides being an authentication server, it can also be used as a reverse proxy with authentication, which allows it to work standalone.

Features

  • Just like auth_basic, simply works with HTTP basic authentication and htpasswd, but with session
  • Authentication server for Nginx auth_request
  • Standalone reverse proxy with authentication
  • Supports HTTP/1, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2
  • Supports HTTPS

Usage

watchdawg requires a config file to work, you can quickly get started with the template in the repository. For basic usage, you only need to choose which port to listen by listen_port, and the path to your htpasswd file by htpasswd_path. Name it config.toml and place it at the same directory with the watchdawg executable, then just run the executable. Or, you can also specify where the config file is like this

./watchdawg --config some/path/to/config.toml

Note

For encryption algorithm of htpasswd, watchdawg currently only support bcrypt

Authentication only

To use watchdawg as an authentication-only server, you need to set enabled in [reverse_proxy] section to false in the config file. Then, you need to specify the name of header containing the session ID that it to response to nginx (the default is X-Auth-Token). And then, you can configure you Nginx like this:

        location / {
            auth_request    /auth;
            auth_request_set $token $upstream_http_x_auth_token;
            add_header Set-Cookie $token;

            root   html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }

        location = /auth {
            internal;
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
            proxy_pass_request_body off;
        }

In the above setting,

  1. proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; : Proxy /auth to the address it listening with proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
  2. auth_request_set $token $upstream_http_x_auth_token;: to set the value of X-Auth-Token header (which is the session ID) to a variable $token.
  3. add_header Set-Cookie $token;: Pass $token to the user through cookies.

Reverse proxy with authentication

watchdawg can be use as a reverse proxy, so it can work standalone without Nginx. To turn on reverse proxy mode, you need to set enabled in [reverse_proxy] section to true in the config file. Then, you need to specify proxy_address to the destination to forward all the requests.

HTTPS

Both authentication-only and reverse proxy mode can use HTTPS. To turn on https, you need to set enabled in [reverse_proxy] section to true in the config file, and set cert and key to the path to your SSL/TLS certificate and private key.

Session storage

The user sessions depend on cookies. In the [session] section of config file, you can specify the name of cookie that storing the session ID by cookie_name, and when to expire by expire_time (denoted in second). On the server side, the user sessions need to be stored somewhere, for now it supports

Where config value
In memory memory
Redis redis

To switch where to store, you can set storage to coresponding config value in the above table. For Redis, you also need to set redis_conn to your connection information (For example redis://user123:password456@127.0.0.1:6379/0) of your redis server.

Benchmark

I'm not sure how to benchmark a reverse proxy, so I simply benchmark authentication only mode. See the results.

Planning

  • More encryption algorithm for htpasswd (like apr1, sha-1)
  • More session storage (maybe SQLite)
  • Docker support
  • Graceful shutdown