[darcs-users] Re: Setting up a server

[Benedikt Schmidt]

"Daan Leijen" <Daan at microsoft.com> writes:

>> Curl (which is also used internally by Darcs) supports both
>> password-based and X.509 authentication, which will work with the
>> built-in authentication support of the web server.
>
> Hmm, you seem to imply that I would need special webserver support?
> What I am hoping for is something more simple like a local file with
> users/passwords that can be verified by the CGI script, like the
> subversion server has. It doesn't have to be ultra-secure -- it just
> has to prevent commits from just anyone most of the time :-) 
>
>> Alternatively, you could require that the patch is signed with a
>> recognised GPG key (since both signing and verification are built into
>> Darcs), though that would mean that authentication is delayed until
>> the patch bundle has already been uploaded.
>
> Ah, and that could be done completely by the CGI script (right?) -- no
> extra server support necessary at all. 
>
> This all sounds great (and a reasonable amount of work!). It would be
> very secure since it just runs as HTTP, and the CGI is simply limited 
> to a few darcs operations -- it can run on anyone's website that can
> run CGI scripts -- no server dependencies. Having this would surely help 
> darcs to get more widespread. Wow, why has no one done this already? :-)

It has already been started, but i'm not sure how usable the client and
server described in
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/8926
are.

Ucw already uses such a cgi for applying patches to a public repo:
http://uncommon-web.com/cgi-bin/ucw_public_apply.cgi

See my other mail for some possible security problems. Another idea
would be to use ssh with authorized keys and a forced command. You
could use a script that receives a patch on stdin and applies it to
the repo instead of the cgi script. Then you could use ssh instead of
the web server for authentication and it should be at least as secure
as the cgi solution.

Benedikt