Please Note: I don't use any third party login accounts in my project, therefore I have no entries in my Database regarding socialaccount app.
I would like to remove following tables from my Database:
How to do that safely without breaking my currently working app. As I said this tables are empty and does not contain any data. If I just drop them and remove the django-allauth socialaccounts app from my installed apps, can I be sure that the django-allauth will continue to work without errors.
It also would be better to mention that in the docs that this allauth.socialaccounts app is not required if we don't want to use third party accounts to login.
Remove data from Models created by django-allauth (to remove relations with your Database project). You find this models in Django Admin.
Remove all django-allauth of your project. INSTALLED_APPS, additional AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS, SOCIALACCOUNT_PROVIDERS, Template loads like {% load socialaccount %}, {% providers_media_js %}, etc.
Drop/cascade all django-allauth tables of your database.
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I have an MVC 5 application set up with windows authentication and my own custom roles table for authorization. This works fine if the user exists in my application database - username in my users table maps to the usernames in active directory.
My question is how do I keep my users table in sync with active directory. Any time a new user is hired, a new record has to be added to my intranet application to ensure this user has access to it.
Is there a way to load users from active directory into my own users table perhaps with some kind of scheduled job or is there a better way to achieve what I'm trying to do?
I think sync two database instances (AD database and you app database) will become management issue as your business grow. Even, adding new user and removing is day to day work, so in both cases you need to execute some sort of action to add or remove users from your app database.
Why don't you ask your team to give you access of AD database and consume this into your intranet app, this is what I was using in my past organization and this works great.
The AD can be used in a programmatic manner. Just look for LDAP stuff and you'll find lots of examples. Here's one to get you started : Connect to Active Directory via LDAP
If your application allows people to register then implement your own custom membership provider which talks to the AD. You can create the users in the AD, you will have to pass the password requirements which are set on the AD as well, which is more than likely a good thing. The roles information can be stored there as well, no need for a local custom roles table either.
I am looking to set up 2 rails apps (with the same tld) which have single sign on and share some user data. If I have railsapp.com I will have the second app set up as otherapp.railsapp.com or railsapp.com/otherapp. I will most likely have railsapp.com handle registration/login etc (open to suggestion if this is not the best solution).
So lets say I sign up and upload an avatar and start accumulating user points on the main-app, I can then browse to the other-app and my profile there has the correct avatar and points total. is there an easy way to achieve this? Do the available SSO solutions create the user in the second app with the same user ID? if not, how are they tied together? (ie how can I query the other app for information I would like to be shared across the 2 - user points and avatar) I was initially looking at sharing a database or at least the user table between the 2 apps, but I can't help thinking there must be an easier solution?
I think the simplest solution is if you set the cookie on the .railsapp.com domain, then it should be sent when you do requests to otherapp.railsapp.com or any other subdomain (just stressing that as it might be a security concern). Remember to mark the cookie as secure!
And a extra bit you might need to make this work, is to store authentication tokens on a database so they can be shared between the two apps.
Disclaimer: I don't have much experience with Rails anymore, so I'm not sure if some of the frameworks like Devise can do something like this out of the box.
Edit
Got curious and ... google had the answer: http://codetheory.in/rails-devise-omniauth-sso/
I need some advice on a Rails app where I want to have signing up to be private (or not have one at all with users pre-registered in the seeds.rb file). In other words, I do not want random people off of the internet to be able to sign up. I know that I could easily not making a signup form and tweak my app accordingly, but the problem lies with the seeds.rb file containing sensitive information (i.e., passwords). The passwords need to somehow be encrypted. Any advice would help. Thanks.
You have multiple options:
Disable sign up and do it manually using an admin user (thinking about ActiveAdmin gem).
Register that users at DB (without rails' knowledge). I don't know what DB you're using, but imagine you're using postgreSQL (for instance). Go to your DB and manually insert the users on DB using some kind of user interface (command-line or graphic/visual)
Use environment variables at deployment that contain passwords.
Give them a default password and make them change password once they log in.
... there are more options, but you need to be explicit about what you want to achieve. Do you want to start with X users and don't add more? Do you want to start with X users and be able to expand to more users?
Currently I am creating a RESTful API for a mobile application. The RESTful API has a number of end points that allow users to exchange personal information between each other. I was testing how secure these endpoints were and quickly realized that if a third party managed to gain access to the API they could easily look up other user's information by guessing their user id or using an automated script to collect a wide range of personal information. This was due to the fact that I was using a primary key that was a simple auto-incremented integer which made it predictable and easy to determine other user's ids. I immediately began looking for something that didn't follow a distinct pattern. I came across UUIDs and decided to implement them with my existing rails app.
Was this a wise decision? I definitely see the upside to using UUIDs but upon further research I found that there were a number of negatives to this approach. Many sources claim that using UUIDs will cause performance issues with large tables. Are UUIDs right for my situation?
My second question is about implementing this in an existing Ruby on Rails application. I made the switch to UUIDs by following this article: http://rny.io/rails/postgresql/2013/07/27/use-uuids-in-rails-4-with-postgresql.html. I ran into an issue with enabling the uuid-ossp extension. I created a migration and put enable_extension 'uuid-ossp' inside the change function. I then changed the existing migrations to support UUIDs as their primary key and ran rake db:drop db:create db:migrate to recreate the database with the edited migrations. This failed with the error PG::UndefinedFunction: ERROR: function uuid_generate_v4() does not exist. I quickly realized that this was because I had created the migration that enabled the uuid-ossp extension after the migrations that I had edited to use UUIDs. When I changed the time stamp in the name of the migration to a date that preceded all migrations the db:migrate command completed with no errors. This felt very hack and defeated the purpose of having migrations. What is the correct way of adding this extension via a migration?
Edit in response to comments:
So a number of comments were made that suggested that I should just be properly authenticating users and checking their permissions before allowing them to view certain data. I have user authentication built into my application but will better explain my situation and why I needed something more than auto-incremented primary keys.
I have a number of users on this application and each user has the ability to create private and public contacts. Public contacts are viewable by everyone using the mobile application. Private contacts can only be viewed by the user who created them. However, a user can share their private contacts with other users by showing other users with the mobile application a QR code that has the contacts ID encoded into it. When the user decodes the contact ID a request is sent to the backend to notify the backend that the user is now an owner of that private contact. This allows the second user to now receive updates from that private contact. This is a large feature of my application. The aim here is to force people to have to exchange these contacts in person and to disallow others from seeing these contacts unless this process has happened.
Implementing this concept proved to be fairly tricky as all users could potentially share all private contacts with any other user on the system. I found this extremely hard to implement using permissions as which contacts a user can view is constantly changing.
Originally I implemented this with auto-incremented integers as my primary key for the contact IDs. It worked but forced me to create a very insecure API endpoint that essentially would take a user ID and a private contact ID as parameters and would add that user as an owner of that contact. Because auto-incremented IDs are so predictable a user with access to the API could essentially loop through a sequence of numbers calling the endpoint each time, pass the sequence number in as the contact ID and add themselves as owners to contacts that hadn't been shared with them. This would by pass the whole process of having to share the contact in person and in large defeats the purpose of having my mobile application.
I decided I needed something less predictable, completely random and unique to each private contact. I found UUIDs while doing research to solve this problem and changed the contact ID in my model to be of type UUID. Are UUIDs the best way to solve this? Should I use something else? Have I gone about solving this problem the wrong way?
Are UUIDs the best way to solve this?
You could use them as a solution. If you do, you should build a new contacts table and model instead of trying to migrate the old model. As well as being tricky to implement, any migration would immediately make existing contact/invite emails invalid (since they contain the old id). Briefly support both models, and retire the old auto-incrementing id model once you are happy that traffic using it is no longer important to your application.
There is still a flaw - your contact share links will now be long-lasting, and if anyone gets access to a contact's id for any reason, and know enough to construct the URL for gaining that user as a contact, then they gain the ability to share it to themselves and anyone else completely outside of the control of your application. This because you are relying on knowledge of the id as the only thing preventing access to the contact details.
Should I use something else?
In my opinion, yes. Use a separate nonce or one-off code model (with UUIDs, or an indexed column containing a long random string - you could use SecureRandom for this) that can grant rights to complete the sharing. When someone wants to share a contact, create the nonce object with details about what is being shared - e.g. the contact_id - and use it to generate email link pointing to a route that will find the nonce and allow access to the resource.
The model doesn't need to be called "Nonce" or contain that as a column, this is just a common name for the pattern. Instead you might call the new model "ContactShare" and the secret property "link_code".
This will allow you to resolve access to contacts using your app's permissions model as normal, and block the possible misuse of sharing links. When the controller with the nonce id or code is invoked, create permissions at that point in order to grant access to the contacts. Then expire or delete the nonce, so it cannot be re-used. I prefer expiry, so you can track usage - this can be as simple as a used boolean column that you update once the sharing request has succeeded.
Note I am not referring to Rack::Auth::Digest nonce routine, which is specific to server authentication. I did not find a RoR pre-built nonce model, but it is possible it goes under a different name.
My site lets people create database entries (which most rails apps do), and I realized that there's a huge drop-off from landing on the site to actually signing up to try it. Basically the service lets users build their own document by combining different components. I'm thinking about adding an interface where visitors who are not yet registered can try out the features (building stuff) and ask them to sign up at the last stage, when they're about to publish their document.
First thing that comes to mind is use HTML5 local storage, but then another idea came to mind: maybe I could create a temporary user whenever a visitor tries out the features, and then later remove them from the database if they don't sign in. I'm not sure if this is safe, but this seems like it might be easier than dealing with all the local storage issues.
What would be the best practice for this type of situation?
HTML5 storage would be an option, tho most likely a lot of client side coding.
Other options would be to have a duplicate table of these 'demo' documents which you can clear every now and again for users that did not sign up. You could also just store the document in the user session, as you don't need it permanently stored, and then store it in the database once they have signed up.