Overview

This plugin provides the ability for your RabbitMQ server to perform authentication (determining who can log in) and authorisation (determining what permissions they have) by making requests to an HTTP server.

As with all authentication plugins, this one requires rabbitmq-server 2.3.1 or later.

Note: it's at an early stage of development, although it's conceptually very simple.

Requirements

You can build and install it like any other plugin (see the plugin development guide).

Binary packages are available at github in the downloads section.

This plugin does not depend on any others.

Enabling the plugin

To enable the plugin, set the value of the auth_backends configuration item for the rabbit application to include rabbit_auth_backend_http. auth_backends is a list of authentication providers to try in order.

So a configuration fragment that enables this plugin only would look like:

[{rabbit, [{auth_backends, [rabbit_auth_backend_http]}]}].

to use only HTTP, or:

[{rabbit,
  [{auth_backends, [rabbit_auth_backend_http, rabbit_auth_backend_internal]}]
 }].

to use both HTTP and the internal database.

Configuring the plugin

You need to configure the plugin to know which URIs to point at.

A minimal configuration file might look like:

[
  {rabbit, [{auth_backends, [rabbit_auth_backend_http]}]},
  {rabbitmq_auth_backend_http,
   [{user_path,     "http://some-server/auth/user"},
    {vhost_path,    "http://some-server/auth/vhost"},
    {resource_path, "http://some-server/auth/resource"}]}
].

What must my web server do?

This plugin requires that your web server respond to requests in a certain predefined format. It will make GET requests against the URIs listed in the configuration file. It will add query string parameters as follows:

user_path

username - the name of the user
password - the password provided (may be missing if e.g. rabbitmq-auth-mechanism-ssl is used)

vhost_path

username - the name of the user
vhost - the name of the virtual host being accessed

Note that you cannot create arbitrary virtual hosts using this plugin; you can only determine whether your users can see / access the ones that exist.

resource_path

username - the name of the user
vhost - the name of the virtual host containing the resource
resource - the type of resource (exchange, queue)
name - the name of the resource
permission - the access level to the resource (configure, write, read) - see the admin guide for their meaning

Your web server should always return HTTP 200 OK, with a body containing:

deny - deny access to the user / vhost / resource
allow - allow access to the user / vhost / resource
allow [list of tags] - (for user_path only) - allow access, and mark the user as an having the tags listed

Debugging

Check the RabbitMQ logs if things don't seem to be working properly. Look for log messages containing "rabbit_auth_backend_http failed".

Example

In examples/rabbitmq_auth_backend_django there's a very simple Django app that can be used for authentication. On Debian / Ubuntu you should be able to run start.sh to launch it after installing the python-django package. It's really not designed to be anything other than an example.

See examples/README for slightly more information.

marklr / rabbitmq-auth-backend-http