OmniAuth BrowserID

Mozilla's BrowserID is a great implementation of verified email that lets you quickly and easily login to websites. This is an OmniAuth strategy that allows you to use BrowserID in your application!

Installation

gem install omniauth-browserid

Usage

BrowserID works using a Javascript-driven popup window. As such, there is a little more work than usual to integrate BrowserID seamlessly into your app. That being said, a default implementation of BrowserID will work as outlined below.

Basic Case

To use the built-in form in order to authenticate with BrowserID, you simply need to add the strategy to your application:

use OmniAuth::Builder do
  provider :browser_id
end

Now all you need to do is redirect your users to /auth/browser_id and you're all set!

Better Integration

To better integrate BrowserID with your application, you will want to use the BrowserID javascript directly in your app. Assuming you included the middleware as described above, here is a way you could structure your HTML:

<html>
  <body>
    <form id='browser_id_form' action='/auth/browser_id/callback'>
      <input type='hidden' name='assertion'/>
      <button type='submit'>Login with BrowserID</button>
    </form>

    <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="https://login.persona.org/include.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type='text/javascript'>
      function loginViaEmail() {
        navigator.id.get(function(assertion) {
          if (assertion) {
            $('input[name=assertion]').val(assertion);
            $('#browser_id_form').submit();
          } else {
            window.location = "#{failure_path}"
          }
        });
      }

      $(function() {
        $('#browser_id_form button').click(function() {
          loginViaEmail();
          return false;
        });
      });
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

What this does is sets up a form with a "Login with BrowserID" button. When the button of the form is clicked, it is intercepted by jQuery and the BrowserID flow is started. BrowserID returns an assertion that is then used to verify an email. In this example, the form points to /auth/browser_id/callback which will automatically perform verification as well as return a standard OmniAuth hash.

Options

These are the options you can specify that are relevant to Omniauth BrowserID:

:verify_url - The verifier URL (defaults to https://verifier.login.persona.org/verify)
:name - The URL at which the strategy will be available (defaults to browser_id)
:audience_url - The host of your site. Defaults to the full_host of OmniAuth (either automatically determined or determined by the OmniAuth.config.full_host option)
:client_options - Any additional options to send to the Faraday connection.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.