CGIT Improvements #155
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CGIT Improvements #155
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401 should be used to request the client to authenitcate (e.g. using http basic auth) and not just to indicate that they are not allowed access to a resource. The HTTP 403 Forbidden status code is better.
Without the embedded option in the cgitrc cgit generates a full html page with its own html and body tags that we were embedding within our existing body creating ill-formed html documents. We can also use noheader to suppress the header bar and avoid the need to hide the logo with custom css rules. By parsing the http headers returned from cgit we can also surface information like content type to the client and suppress wrapping the output in our html if it is supposed to be binary data which allows us to bring back the plain view button.
We can wire up cgit to request credentials from a git client during a clone operation via the basic authentication scheme that is part of HTTP and verify them so that course materials can be hosted entirely in cgit.
no functional change, just moving the current one command used to start orbit from being inline within a `CMD` instruction to a separate .sh script to make way for adding more commands.
While the clone functionality works it bottlenecked by the speed of the secure cryptographic hash needed to verify passwords. By caching recent successful authentication attempts we can skip hashing the password repeatedly. Memcached is a simple and robust program that implements a memory only cache that can be queried and updated using a text or binary protocol over tcp, udp, or a unix domain socket. While there are python libraries that can act as a client for a memcached daemon, all the libraries I evaluated were unnesecarily bloated and complex as compared to just calling the C library with our own bindings for the three functions we need using the builtin python C foreign function interface module.
In order to minimize the security impact, the cache entries are set to expire after only 2 seconds and are only stored in ram because of how memcached works. Credentials are hashed before being stored and the current timestamp is included in order to prevent the same credentials from always having the same cache entry.
theyoyojo
approved these changes
Sep 5, 2024
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A more correct implementation of the CGI protocol when communicating with cgit allows us to produce more well formed html output, re-enable the
plainview button, and allow clone over http.