Malan Authentication Service

Malan is a basic authentication service that you can drop into you microservice ecosystem, or even use as a base for a new Phoenix project.

Use Malan

Basic endpoints you'll use

If using Malan as an authentication service, there are 3 main endpoints you'll use:

Create a user: POST /api/users
Login (get an auth token) for a user: POST /api/sessions
Check auth status: GET /api/users/whoami

Structuring your app with Malan

There are a couple of different ways to structure your application. One way to structure your app around Malan is to outsource your user and session model to Malan. Malan allows you to set an arbitrary JSON blob (called custom_attrs) on each user, so you can pack a decent amount of info in there. The user's API token can be stored in session storage and you can easily use just the token to retrieve the relevant user from Malan. If the token is expired, revoked, or otherwise invalid then no user will be returned so you can trigger a new login page.

Another common option is to maintain a minimal User table in your app that contains the user's malan ID. If you have a number of things you want to store then this may be a better approach than jamming everything into custom_attrs.

Run Malan

If you have a clone of this repo, you can start Malan easily using Docker Compose:

docker-compose up

Adding Malan service to an eco-system

If you are adding Malan to your current application, you can make use of the example docker-compose file. You will need to add Malan, and a Postgres for Malan to use as its data store.

version: "3.9"
services:
  postgres:
    image: 'docker.io/postgres:12.6-alpine'
    volumes:
      - 'pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data'  # Use a docker volume for the database files
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: 'postgres'
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: 'postgres'

  malan:
    image: 'docker.io/freedomben/malan-dev:latest'
    ports:
      - "4000:4000"
    environment:
      DB_INIT: 'Yes'
      DB_USERNAME: 'postgres'
      DB_PASSWORD: 'postgres'
      DB_HOSTNAME: 'postgres'
      BIND_ADDR: '0.0.0.0'
    depends_on:
      - 'postgres'

volumes:
  pgdata:

Setting up a local development environment

You'll need to:

1. Install Elixir and Mix

Setup instructions vary by platform.

Fedora, CentOS, or RHEL:

dnf install -y elixir

Ubuntu:

apt install -y elixir

Mac OS:

brew install elixir

2. Setup Hex

mix local.hex

If you need to install Phoenix separately, you can do so with hex:

mix archive.install hex phx_new 1.5.8

3. Clone this repo and install dependencies

git clone https://github.com/freedomben/malan.git \
cd malan
mix deps.get

4. Run migrations

Note: You'll need Postgres to be running before completing this step. If you are not using docker-compose, you can make use of the script at script/start-postgres.sh to quickly get a database running.

mix ecto.setup

5. Start the Phoenix server

mix phx.server

Malan API

The Malan API is a pretty standard REST interface. For details, please visit API.md.

If your client will be in TypeScript, you can also consider using libmalan, a simple utility package that provides TypeScript methods.

CI/CD and Deployment

Staging deploys automatically upon merge to main. Prod deploys after being tagged:

git tag "prod-$(date '+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S')"
git push --tags

Configuring PostgreSQL users

You should run the web application as a non-privileged user that cannot run DDL commands, and the migrations as a privileged user who can.

CREATE ROLE malan WITH LOGIN PASSWORD '<somepassword>';
GRANT CONNECT ON DATABASE malan_prod TO user;
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO malan;

ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES FOR ROLE
    malan
  IN SCHEMA
    public
  GRANT
    SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
  ON TABLES TO
    malan;

Helpful links regarding Phoenix

Official website: https://www.phoenixframework.org/
Guides: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html
Docs: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix
Forum: https://elixirforum.com/c/phoenix-forum
Source: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix

CI/CD

The CI/CD system utilizes Github Actions to run automated builds, tests, and deployments to all environments.

Environments

Prod

The Production environment is where the production instances of the application are running. Deployments to Production are fully automated but are not automatic. Deploys to Production are triggered using git tags.

Staging

The staging environment. Staging is typically a small change ahead of production to allow for testing in a "prod-like" environment

All commits, merges, and tags added to the main branch will automatically trigger a deployment to staging.

The pieces to CI/CD in this repo are these

.github/workflows/build-test-deploy.yaml: This yaml file contains the Github-specific configuration. It tells Github Actions how to run the build, push the image, run the tests, and deploy the change.
`scripts/build-release.sh: This script contains the instructions that build the release into an image.
`scripts/push-release.sh: This script contains the instructions that push the application image to the registry.
`scripts/deploy-release.sh: This script contains the instructions that deploy the change to Kubernetes. It contains the bulk of the CD logic.

Audit Logs

Many actions are logged in the audit log. Whether the action result is success or failure, it is logged. The data that is sent as part of the request is recorded for later analysis.

Here is a (non comprehensive) list of actions logged:

Creating a user. Includes the original creation data except password
Updating a user. Includes the changed data
Locking a user
Unlocking a user
Deleting a user
Requesting a password reset token
Using a password reset token
Changing a user password
Creating a session (aka "logging in")
Deleting a session (aka "logging out")
Extending a session

While there aren't (currently) any REST API endpoints for logs they can be accessed through the database, either using iex or using Postgres (examples shown using psql).

NOTE: In order to optimize the logs table for writes, the indexes are minimal. This means there is a long and beefy table scan for querying. Keep this in mind if you have a large production table!

Using psql

Get a shell in a running container. If using Kubernetes, you can use kubectl exec. Substitute the pod name for a current pod in your environment. You can list them with kubectl -n malan-staging get pods

$ kubectl -n malan-staging exec -it <valid-pod-name> -- bash

Start a psql shell. There is a convenient alias in the bashrc already that you can use to connect to the database for that pod:

$ psql-malan

Run your queries. There are some examples in the next section:

Postgres example queries:

Get entire log history for a user with ID ffa9c147-900b-4813-b738-9b924237fdc7 (Note this could be huge! Use caution in production)

SELECT *
FROM logs
WHERE user_id = 'ffa9c147-900b-4813-b738-9b924237fdc7'
ORDER BY logs.inserted_at DESC;

Get 10 most recent logs for a user with ID ffa9c147-900b-4813-b738-9b924237fdc7

SELECT *
FROM logs
WHERE user_id = 'ffa9c147-900b-4813-b738-9b924237fdc7'
ORDER BY logs.inserted_at DESC
LIMIT 10;

Get 10 most recent logs for a user with email address hello@example.com

SELECT logs.*
FROM logs
JOIN users ON logs.user_id = users.id
WHERE users.email = 'hello@example.com'
ORDER BY logs.inserted_at DESC
LIMIT 10;

Get the 10 most recent logs for user with ID ef886248-32b9-48c1-bd4d-303c1cda1f94 that were "Unauthorized login attempt":

SELECT *
FROM logs
WHERE user_id = 'ef886248-32b9-48c1-bd4d-303c1cda1f94'
  AND what LIKE '%Unauthorized%'
ORDER BY inserted_at DESC
LIMIT 10;

Get the 10 most recent logs for user email hello@example.com that were "Unauthorized login attempt":

SELECT logs.*
FROM logs
JOIN users ON logs.user_id = users.id
WHERE users.email = 'hello@example.com'
  AND logs.what LIKE '%Unauthorized%'
ORDER BY logs.inserted_at DESC
LIMIT 10;

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Where does the name "malan" come from?

It's an extremely nerdy name based on a character from the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson.

FreedomBen / malan