The repoze.what Quickstart plugin

Author:Gustavo Narea.
Latest release:1.0.9

Overview

This plugin allows you to take advantage of a rather simple, and usual, authentication and authorization setup, in which the users’ data, the groups and the permissions used in the application are all stored in a SQLAlchemy or Elixir-managed database.

Put simply, it configures repoze.who and repoze.what in one go so that you can have an authentication and authorization system working quickly – hence the name.

How to install

The minimum requirements are SQLAlchemy, repoze.who.plugins.sa, repoze.who.plugins.friendlyform, repoze.what and repoze.what.plugins.sql, and you can install it all with easy_install:

easy_install repoze.what-quickstart

Support and development

The prefered place to ask questions is the Repoze mailing list. Some users are on the #repoze IRC channel.

This project is hosted on GitHub.

How to use it

To get started quickly, you may copy the SQLAlchemy-powered model defined in model_sa_example.py (or model_elixir_example.py for Elixir) and then create at least a few rows to try it out:

u = User()
u.user_name = u'manager'
u.password = u'managepass'

DBSession.save(u)

g = Group()
g.group_name = u'managers'

g.users.append(u)

DBSession.save(g)

p = Permission()
p.permission_name = u'manage'
p.groups.append(g)

DBSession.save(p)
DBSession.flush()

Now that you have some rows in your database, you can set up authentication and authorization as explained in the next section.

How to set it up

Although this is a repoze.what plugin and repoze.what is meant to deal with authorization only, this module configures authentication and identification for you through repoze.who as well.

Such a setup is performed by the setup_sql_auth() function:

See “changing attribute names” to learn how to use the translations argument in setup_sql_auth().

Customizing the model definition

Your auth-related model doesn’t have to be like the default one, where the class for your users, groups and permissions are, respectively, User, Group and Permission, and your users’ user name is available in User.user_name. What if you prefer Member and Team instead of User and Group, respectively? Or what if you prefer Group.members instead of Group.users? Read on!

Changing class names

Changing the name of an auth-related class (User, Group or Permission) is a rather simple task. Just rename it in your model, and then make sure to update the parameters you pass to setup_sql_auth() accordingly.

Changing attribute names

You can also change the name of the attributes assumed by repoze.what in your auth-related classes, such as renaming User.groups to User.memberships.

Changing such values is what repoze.what calls “translating”. You may set the translations for the attributes of the models repoze.what deals with in a dictionary passed to setup_sql_auth() as its translations parameters. For example, if you want to replace Group.users with Group.members, you may use the following translation dictionary:

translations['users'] = 'members'

Below are the translations that you would be able to set in the translations dictionary used above:

  • user_name: The translation for the attribute in User.user_name.
  • users: The translation for the attribute in Group.users.
  • group_name: The translation for the attribute in Group.group_name.
  • groups: The translation for the attribute in User.groups and Permission.groups.
  • permission_name: The translation for the attribute in Permission.permission_name.
  • permissions: The translation for the attribute in User.permissions and Group.permissions.
  • validate_password: The translation for the method in User.validate_password.