2018-12-13
in
3 min read
With the documentation changes wrapped up, but holding off on PR’s until things solidify up a bit more from the code scrub process, it was time to move on to the OpenID deep dive and review. Up until now I’ve been working with an authorization workflow that required me to request a new token ever 24 hours and for the user to authenticate it. I wasn’t sure how much of that was because of the flow I chose or intrinsic to how it was coded up. As I continued to go over the OpenID documentation and other articles on the process I just couldn’t get it working. It was then clear to me that what I needed was an example to help me.
Luckily Nov Matake created some example projects to go along with his OpenID gems, one for the OpenID Connect Provider (the server side) and one for the OpenID Relying Party (the app side). I figured with that everything would be good to go. After all this was the same code he had running up on Heroku but I wanted to see the nitty gritty details and set it up on both sides since I was going to need to do that with Diaspora and the test harness, or any other API use case I may be interested in. As I had come to find out quickly these projects have never been updated. They still rely on old versions of Ruby and Rails. Instead of trying to downshift everything to these versions I decided to fork the projects and get them running under Ruby 2.4+ and Rails 5. Unfortunately that derailed my entire Diaspora development effort for the day. The upside is that the community will have modern versions of these projects to use. I intend to polish them up a little more and then issue a PR back to the original project. My versions however can be found on my GitHub profile with the Connection Provider here and the Relying Party here .
In the process of doing these upgrades I was able to learn a lot more about porting Ruby code up from older versions. I also got a much better understanding of some OpenID flows. I’m going to use that to continue to move forward on the review of the implementation in the API and looking at client side implementation details. Because of the complexity of that whole process I think that’s probably something developers can use a good amount of help for via blog posts and examples.
In Summary:
- Documentation updates are complete but waiting for PRs for after the code scrub
- Updated Ruby on Rails OpenID examples from Nov Matake to work under Rails 5
You can follow the status dashboard at this Google Sheet as well.