pyramid_persona

pyramid_persona let you quickly set up authentication using persona on your pyramid project. It provides a way to conveniently replace the login form and all the processing and security concerns that comes with it. It aims at giving as much as possible with as little configuration as possible, while still letting you customize if you want. If you want to see some screenshots of the demo app, take a look at this blog post.

You can find it on pypi as pyramid_persona. Also don't forget to check the documentation.

Very basic usage

First of all, include pyramid_persona. Add this in your project configuration

config.include("pyramid_persona")

Then, we need two little lines in your config files : a secret used to sign cookies, and the audience, the hostname and port of your website (this is needed for security reasons):

persona.secret = This is some secret string
persona.audiences = http://localhost:6543

There, we're done. We now have a nice forbidden view with a persona login button.

Less basic usage

pyramid_persona also provides you a way to easily put a login or logout button on your pages. To do so, you need to include jquery, the persona library, and some application-specific in your heads. The application specific javascript can be accessed as request.persona_js.

Then, you can add the button in your page. request.persona_button provides a login if the user is not logged in, and a logout button if they are.

A basic page might be (using mako)

<html>
<head>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script src="https://login.persona.org/include.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">${request.persona_js}</script>
</head>
<body>
Hello ${user}
${request.persona_button}
</body>
</html>

Customized buttons

You can also use your own buttons. For that, you have to include the javascript like in the previous section and give your login and logout button the signin and signout classes. For example

<button id='signin'>login</button>
<button id='signout'>logout</button>

What it does

pyramid_persona is a login system. It replaces login forms and views, and the need to handle passwords.

pyramid_persona is not an authentication policy. It only handles the login process and requires an authentication policy to remember the user between requests (SessionAuthenticationPolicy is used by default).

Here is, in details, what including pyramid_persona does :

it defines an authentication policy, an authorization policy, and a session factory (this is needed for csrf protection, and is why we need a secret). Defaults are SessionAuthenticationPolicy, ACLAuthorizationPolicy and UnencryptedCookieSessionFactoryConfig. You can override it if you prefer.
it adds a persona_js request attribute containing the javascript code needed to make persona work.
it adds a persona_button request attribute containing html code for quickly putting a login button.
it defines the /login and /logout views to handle the persona workflow.
it defines a basic forbidden view with a login button.

You can replace any part you like if the default behaviour doesn't work for you and the configuration isn't enough.

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