HTTP Header Authentication for Etherpad

Etherpad plugin to use a reverse proxy's HTTP headers for authentication.

If the X-Authenticated-User header is present in the HTTP request coming from your reverse proxy, then the user is considered to have already been authenticated by your reverse proxy. The header's value is used as the user's username.

If the X-Authenticated-Name header is present, the user's displayed name is forced to that header's value.

The headers used by the plugin can be customized.

Configuration

To use this plugin the trustProxy and requireAuthentication config items must be set to true, otherwise it won't work as expected.

In your settings.json:

{
  // ...
  "trustProxy": true,
  "requireAuthentication": true,
  "ep_headerauth": {
    // Defaults to "x-authenticated-user"
    "username_header": "x-authenticated-user",
    // Defaults to "x-authenticated-name"
    "displayname_header": "x-authenticated-name"
  },
  // ...
}

Installation

Install from the Etherpad admin UI (Admin → Manage Plugins, search for ep_headerauth and click Install), or from the Etherpad root directory:

pnpm run plugins install ep_headerauth

⚠️ Don't run npm i / npm install yourself from the Etherpad source tree — Etherpad tracks installed plugins through its own plugin-manager, and hand-editing package.json can leave the server unable to start.

After installing, restart Etherpad.

Copyright and License

Copyright © 2020 Richard Hansen rhansen@rhansen.org

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.