Extension:OpenID

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OpenID

Release status: stable
Implementation  User identity, Special page
Description Allow users with accounts on other OpenID-enabled sites to log in
Author(s)  Evan ProdromouTalk
Last Version  0.9.0 (2009-06-21)
MediaWiki  1.6.x-1.14.x (?)
License GPL
Download Download snapshot

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README (SVN)
Example  Special:OpenIDLogin Openid Website

check usage (experimental)

This is the README file for the OpenID extension for MediaWiki software. The extension is only useful if you've got a MediaWiki installation; it can only be installed by the administrator of the site.

The extension lets users log in with an OpenID (http://www.openid.net/) instead of a username and password. An OpenID is a special URL that people can use to log in to a Web site. The extension also lets users who have an account on the wiki log in to other OpenID-aware Web sites with their wiki user page as their OpenID.

Typical uses:

  • Single-signon between multiple affiliated wikis and other sites. We have almost 20 wikis that work together for Wikitravel, and users can login to different Wikitravel wikis with their home wiki account.
  • Single-signon across the Internet. Many, many sites now support OpenID, including "big names" like Yahoo!, Google, and AOL. Allowing users to login with OpenID means one less step for them to contribute to your wiki.
  • Distributed reputation. Logging into a new wiki with the same username as you have on another wiki doesn't prove that they're the same person. Logging in with your OpenID from the old wiki does. Using OpenID can help build a distributed reputation across the wiki world.

The software supports OpenID 2.0 and requires the openidenabled.com 2.x libraries. Users of previous versions should see #Upgrade for more information.

This extension has been in use for years on several large wikis without known security problems. However, no software is completely bug-free or secure, and there's no guarantee that this software will work as advertised. See #Bugs / Feature requests section below for info on how to report problems.

Contents

[edit] License

Copyright 2006, 2007 Internet Brands (http://www.internetbrands.com/)
Copyright 2008 Evan Prodromou (http://vinismo.com/en/User:Evan)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

[edit] Author

Evan Prodromou <evan@vinismo.com>

Patches for YADIS support and FileStore storage by Jonathan Daugherty <cygnus@janrain.com>.

Provider UI and some other changes by Sergey Chernyshev

[edit] Pre-requisites

This software has been tested in production with MediaWiki 1.11.x. It may or may not work with earlier or later versions, but I'm interested in making later versions work, and I'd be happy to make minor changes to make older, unsupported versions work too.

The software depends on the OpenIDEnabled.com PHP library for OpenID, which in turn depends on the OpenIDEnabled.com PHP library for YADIS. At the time of this writing, info on installing these libraries was available here:

http://www.openidenabled.com/php-openid/

The last version tested with is 2.0.1; versions below 2.0 will not work. If you must use version 1.x of the openidenabled.com library, you can use the unsupported version 0.7.0 or below of this extension.

There are also some required PHP extensions; see the OpenIDEnabled documentation for details. This software has been tested with the gmp and curl PHP extensions installed, and it's recommended that you install them, too.

Note that some versions of MediaWiki overwrite the PHP library path in LocalSettings.php. You may need to add the path to your PHP library directory to the $path variable, like "/usr/share/php" or "/usr/local/share/php".

[edit] How to get GMP working on Debian

In Debian Lenny (5.0) there is a php5-gmp package ready for use.

In Debian Etch (4.0) there is no php5-gmp package, but you can build your own by following these instructions (take care not to break your server, though) or downloading an unofficial i386 binary package (note that i386 is not amd64).

You may need to recompile php with the option: --with-gmp

Note that the php-openid library works ok with bcmath (available on etch) but this eats a lot of CPU, so unless your server is not used a lot you will want to install gmp.

If you don't know whether you have gmp or bcmath or none of these, then download the php-openid library, untar it, and run php ./examples/detect.php or use phpinfo().

[edit] How to get php-openid working on Debian

Debian Lenny (5.0) has a php-openid package.

No such package exists for Debian etch (4.0).

Download php-openid from its source and read README and README.Debian

[edit] Installation

To install, copy all the files in the archive you downloaded to the OpenID subdirectory of the extensions subdirectory of your MediaWiki installation. Note that the software depends on having its code all in the "OpenID" sub-directory; naming it "OpenID-Test" or "newextension1" or whatever won't work.

Run update.php script in in your MediaWiki maintenance folder to create necessary tables in MediaWiki database.

Version 0.3 and below of this extension used a different database structure that was pretty inefficient. If you installed this extension before, you should copy the optionToTable.php script to your MediaWiki "maintenance" directory and run it from the command line. This will copy the OpenID mappings from the user table to the new table (but it doesn't erase the old data... just in case).

In your MediaWiki LocalSettings.php, add the following line some place towards the bottom of the file:

require_once("$IP/extensions/OpenID/OpenID.setup.php");

Note: If you used the snapshot page to download for MediaWiki version 1.12.x or earlier, use:

require_once("$IP/extensions/OpenID/OpenID.php");

Theoretically it should work out of the box, but you'll almost definitely want to set the trust root and access controls (see Configuration below).

[edit] Upgrade

This is an incompatible upgrade to the previous version of the MediaWiki OpenID library. In particular, the interfaces of the openidenabled.com libraries have changed from 1.x to 2.x, and no effort has been made to retain backwards compatibility with the 1.x versions of the library.

To upgrade, you'll need to do at least the following:

  • Install the 2.x version of the openidenabled.com PHP OpenID library.
  • Check that your consumer and server stores are correct. I got tired of maintaining the MemcStore that nobody seemed to want, so if you used that, you need to use the filestore now. See below for how to configure it.
  • Change your require_once line in LocalSettings.php to use the .setup.php file.
  • 'openidlogininstructions' is now wikitext, not HTML. If you've customized it, you may need to re-customize it. Also, it's now shown below the login box, so if you say the box below, you may want to change that to the box above.
  • The extension has been converted to use a clumsy and perverse OOP-like structure, with one class per special page. Most function names have been changed to methods of these classes. If you used them, look around for their replacements.
  • The extension has been converted to use the autoloading features of MediaWiki, which means that you need to require() the files directly if you really want to use their code. Or you might get lucky and have autoloading work for you.

If you find other incompatibilities that I haven't mentioned here, please let me know.

[edit] Logging in using OpenID

To log in to the wiki using an OpenID, go to the Special:OpenIDLogin page on the wiki. Add the OpenID identity URL to the login box, and click "Verify".

This should take you to the OpenID server for your identity, where you can either log in (if you're not already) or approve allowing the wiki to use your OpenID for logging in. If the OpenID server supports the Simple Registration Extension ('sreg'), it may also ask you whether to share personal information like your preferred nickname, real name, email address, etc. Choose as you wish.

Once you're logged in to your OpenID server, and you've finished approving the login, you should return to the wiki from whence you came automatically.

Every user who logs in with an OpenID identity for the first time will be assigned a "fake" username in the local wiki. (This just makes things work better.)

If you've allowed your nickname to be passed to the wiki, and it's not already taken, and it's a legal MediaWiki user name, then it should use that for your login automatically.

If not, the extension will try to make up some good candidate usernames for you and present you with a choice. If you don't like any of them, you can make up your own.

After you're logged in, you can edit, read, write, and do all the other things that MediaWiki users do. Since you've got a "real" account, you'll also have a home page and a message page and such. It should also be possible to assign extra permissions ('sysop', 'bureaucrat') to the account. You can log out as normal.

To log back in, use the OpenIDLogin page again. Don't try to login using the regular login page, since it won't work.

You can log in with an Interwiki abbreviation of an URL right now, but that's experimental and may disappear in later versions. Don't fall in love with this convenient, useful feature. You may get hurt.

[edit] Using a MediaWiki account as an OpenID

To log in to other sites with your MediaWiki account, your OpenID identity URL is the full URL of your MediaWiki user page. So, for example, the author's identity URL is:

http://wikitravel.org/en/User:Evan

When you use this OpenID with another site, logging in should take you to the wiki site. You may need to enter your password if you're not already logged in.

You'll then be asked if you want to let the other site log you in, and if you want the MediaWiki wiki to share your personal information (nickname, email, full name, language) with the other site. Choose what feels comfortable to you. For some sites, you may not be asked; see Configuration below.

Once you've finished deciding, the other site will finish the login.

You can't log in through OpenID on the same server. You can't use the user page for a fake account created for an OpenID login as an OpenID itself.

[edit] Configuration

The administrator can configure these variables in the LocalSettings.php file. Please read carefully.

$wgTrustRoot
This is an URL that identifies your site to OpenID servers. Typically, it's the "root" url of the site, like "http://en.wikipedia.org/" or "http://wikitravel.org/it/". If this is not set, the software will make a half-hearted guess, but it's not very good and you should probably just set it.
$wgOpenIDConsumerDenyByDefault
The administrator can decide which OpenIDs are allowed to login to their server. If this flag is true, only those OpenIDs that match one of the $wgOpenIDConsumerAllow and not one of the $wgOpenIDConsumerDeny patterns will be allowed to log in. If it is false, all OpenIDs are allowed to log in, unless they are matched by an $wgOpenIDConsumerDeny pattern and not an $wgOpenIDConsumerAllow. Typically you'll set this to true for testing and then false for general use.
$wgOpenIDConsumerAllow
an array of regular expressions that match OpenIDs you want to allow to log in. For example, "@^(http://)?wikitravel.org/@" will allow OpenIDs from the Wikitravel domain.
$wgOpenIDConsumerDeny
an array of regular expressions that match OpenIDs you want to deny access to. This is mostly useful for servers that are known to be bad. Example: "#^(http://)?example.com/#".
$wgOpenIDServerForceAllowTrust
an array of regular expressions that match trust roots that you want to skip trust checks for when the user logs in from those sites. A typical example would be a closely federated cluster of sites (like Wikimedia, Wikia, or

Wikitravel) where the personal data is available to the trusting server anyways. Be very careful using this across organizational boundaries.

$wgOpenIDConsumerStoreType
$wgOpenIDServerStoreType
strings denoting the type of storage to be used to store OpenID association data when acting as an OpenID relying party (consumer) and server, respectively. Only valid value is "file"; "memc" no long valid.
$wgOpenIDConsumerStorePath
$wgOpenIDServerStorePath
strings specifying the paths where OpenID assocation data should be stored when acting as a relying party (consumer) or server, respectively. Each of these need only be set if the store type settings (above) are set to "file", respectively. These strings, if both are set, MUST NOT be equal. If the store type is "file", the default here is "/tmp/$wgDBname/openidconsumer/" and "/tmp/$wgDBname/openidserver/" respectively. The path will be automatically created if it doesn't exist at runtime.
$wgHideOpenIDLoginLink
boolean that says whether or not to hide the OpenID login link in the personal URLs. Typically you'd use this if you've already got some other method for showing the OpenID login link, like in your skin. Note that it will *not* prevent login if the user navigates to Special:OpenIDLogin directly; it's simply cosmetic. This is mostly a backwards-compatibility option.
$wgOpenIDLoginLogoUrl
Url of the OpenID login logo. Defaults to http://www.openid.net/login-bg.gif, but you may want to move it to

a local URL, or an URL on a CDN, if that kind of thing floats your boat.

$wgOpenIDShowUrlOnUserPage
whether to show the OpenID identity URL on a user's home page. Possible values are 'always', 'never', or 'user'

(lets the user decide). Default is 'user'.

$wgOpenIDShowProviderIcons
defaults to false due to potential brand issues. With this enabled, users will see button graphics instead of just links in OpenID provider UI.

[edit] Skins

If you are customizing a skin, and you want to show the OpenID identity for a user (say, on their user page), use the function OpenIDGetUserUrl($user). It takes a User object (not a name or an id!) and returns the user's OpenID identity if it exists, or null if it doesn't.

[edit] Translation

The user interface strings for this extension are configurable through the same Special:Allmessages page as MediaWiki itself. They all start with "openid", and they're no more or less cryptic than MediaWiki's. You can look at OpenID.i18n.php for some details.

[edit] OpenID services

These are some of the OpenID services I tested this extension with; all have free signup for identities if you want to test, too.

[edit] Bugs / Feature requests

Please submit bugs into Bugzilla under OpenID extension component.

If you have time, please help us move stuff from TODO file into Bugzilla.

[edit] Discussion group

You can also send questions to the discussion group: http://groups.google.com/group/mediawiki-openid

[edit] TODO

  • Move TODO file and things below into Bugzilla
  • Consolidate README in subversion and this document

The TODO file in this distribution has stuff I think needs to be todone; + marks show things I've already done, and - shows things that are yet to be done.

The big changes for the future:

  • Configure some stuff through Special:Preferences or a dedicated control panel
  • Auto-login if you've logged in before with an OpenID, and are logged into that account now

[edit] 0.9 roadmap

Current trunk version is a code that will go towards 0.9 release.

Please post features / fixes for 0.9 release as bugs blocking bug 19349 (dependencies).

[edit] CHANGES

  • 0.8.4.1 (April 16, 2009) - Post-release fix to broken icon on user's page.
  • 0.8.4 (April 16, 2009) - Added provider buttons to the OpenID login page with optional icons ($wgOpenIDShowProviderIcons)

[edit] MediaWiki sites supporting OpenID

Retrieved from "http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID"