authlogic_pam is a plugin for authlogic that authenticates users using PAM, the Pluggable Authentication Modules framework. This allows you to easily accept the same usernames and passwords from web sites that you do on the web server itself.

Note that this may carry some significant security risks along with it. At the very least, you want to be using SSL encryption when sending the actual passwords for user accounts on your web server over the wire.

authlogic_pam requires the following to be installed on your server:

• The PAM framework (virtually all Linux distributions include this)
• The rpam gem
• authlogic, of course

1. sudo gem install authlogic rpam authlogic_pam
2. In your authlogic-using application, add the following line to config/environment.rb (or wherever you are storing gem dependencies):
   • config.gem ‘authlogic_pam’
3. Ensure that your User model contains a string field called “pam_login”. The basic authlogic “login”, “crypted_password” and “password_salt” fields are unnecessary for PAM (although you may wish to keep them if you have non-PAM users as well).
4. Create Users for each user you’d like to grant PAM access. Make sure the “pam_login” field is exactly the same as their PAM username.
5. In your login form views, add fields for “pam_login” and “pam_password”. Also make sure to use references to these fields (rather than “login” and “password”) elsewhere in your views, where appropriate.

Copyright © 2009-2010 Nat Budin

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