rack_my_openid - a one-user OpenID provider solution for rack

So you have a Rack/Sinatra/Rails-powered blog and you want to make it an OpenID?

Now you can do it in under 5 minutes.

Operation details

Rack_my_openid is a simple, single-user OpenID provider inspired by (now deprecated) phpMyId. It uses

ruby-openid for the protocol implementation;
simple Yaml files for storing configuration;
in-memory storage for authentication data;
HTTP Digest authentication for security;
Sinatra and Rack as the server backend.

It's designed to be drop-in compatible with any Rails application, since implementing OpenID is a confusing exercise even with ruby-openid. I extracted it from my own site/blog and am continuing to use it there.

It's fully covered by RSpec tests.

See the OpenID specs if you really want to understand how the whole thing works.

Installation - Rails 3

Add the rack_my_openid gem to your Gemfile

Add this to your routes:

openid_provider = RackMyOpenid::Provider.new(YAML.load_file('config/rack_my_openid.yml'))
match '/openid' => openid_provider 
match '/openid/*whatever' => openid_provider

The /openid path can't be changed, as of this release.

Create a config/rack_my_openid.yml file (see below)
Restart your Rails app and you're good to go.
If you make any changes to the config you'll have to restart the app to pick them up.

Installation - Standalone

This assumes that the OpenID is the root path.

Install the rack_my_openid gem.

Create a config.ru in your desired path with these contents:

require 'rack_my_openid'
run RackMyOpenid::Provider.new(YAML.load_file('rack_my_openid.yml'))

Create a rack_my_openid.yml file (see below) in the same path
Create empty /public and /tmp directories in the same path
Deploy with Passenger, Rackup or whatever Rack handler you fancy.

`rack_my_openid.yml`

This is a simple flat Yaml file. The keys are symbols (as of this release).

:credentials - run md5 -s 'yourusername:rack_my_openid:yourpassword' (or replace rack_my_openid with your realm name if you changed it);
:openid - the actual OpenID identifier that you want to provide;
:realm - the realm for HTTP Digest auth. The default is "rack_my_openid", why would you change it?
:endpoint_url - the URL of the OpenID endpoint (the one that's '/openid'). You shouldn't explicitly declare it

TODO

Support stores other than memory store
Support SReg data provision

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