ckanext-emailauth

CKAN Authentication using Email as primary identifier including username

ckanext-emailauth allows you to:

1. Enable registration / login via email or username
2. Do email verification based on any SMTP server as per configuration you provide
3. Ability to store extra user information as key value pair in user_extra table
4. Reset password via email verification link with link expiry

Requirements

Supports Python 2.7 and Python 3.8, tested with CKAN 2.8.4 / CKAN 2.9.1

Installation

To install ckanext-emailauth:

1. Activate your CKAN virtual environment, for example:

   . /usr/lib/ckan/default/bin/activate

2. Clone repository and install the ckanext-emailauth requirements first by:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Install extension into your virtual environment:

   python setup.py install

4. Add emailauth to the ckan.plugins setting in your CKAN config file (by default the config file is located at /etc/ckan/default/production.ini).
5. Follow configuration step below to add necessary details and then do Database Initialization

6. Restart CKAN. For example if you've deployed CKAN with Apache on Ubuntu:

   sudo service apache2 reload

Configuration

ckanext-emailauth has few custom configuration which is required before running:

ckan.mail.key=email_id@domain.com
ckan.mail.secret=password
ckan.mail.sent_from=email_id@domain.com
# Optional
password.reset_key.expiry_hours=4

Database Initialization

ckanext-emailauth requires two custom table which needs to be initialized. Change directory inside ckanext-emailauth:

If you are using CKAN 2.8 or less:

paster user_validation initdb -c /path/to/development.ini
paster user_extra initdb -c /path/to/development.ini

For CKAN 2.9 or greater:

ckan -c /path/to/ckan.ini user_validation initdb
ckan -c /path/tp/ckan.ini user_extra initdb

Modifying Authenticator

In your who.ini (usually in /usr/lib/ckan/ckan-env/src/ckan/who.ini) file add custom authenticator as:

[authenticators]
plugins =
    auth_tkt
    ckanext.emailauth.authenticator:EmailAuthenticator

This will enable EmailAuthenticator during all authenticator process, it allows you to do authentication both via username and if username is not found, then it will search for email

Development Installation

To install ckanext-emailauth for development, activate your CKAN virtualenv and do:

git clone https://github.com/justicehub-in/ckanext-emailauth.git
cd ckanext-emailauth
python setup.py develop

Future of this plugin?

Right now it's mostly focused on being by ckanext-justicehub_theme and it's hard to generalize it for normal usage. Few challenges are:

1. Popup based authentication responses
2. Schema is fixed right now but it should be configurable
3. Templates are hardcoded based on theme usage