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.

Downloading

You can download a pre-built binary of this plugin from http://www.rabbitmq.com/community-plugins.html.

Building

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

This plugin depends on the Erlang client (just to grab a URI parser).

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 try the HTTP plugin first and then fall back to the internal database.

See http://www.rabbitmq.com/configure.html#configuration-file for more detail on auth_backends.

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.