TWikiUserAuthentication < TWiki

TWiki does not authenticate users internally, it depends on the =REMOTE_USER= environment variable. This variable is set when you enable basic authentication or authentication via SSL (https protocol)

TWiki keeps track who made changes to topics at what time. This gives a complete audit trail of changes.

No special installation steps need to be performed in case the server is already autenticated. If not you can opt for one of these:
	* Forget about authentication. All changes will be registered as %MAINWEB%.TWikiGuest user, e.g. you can't tell who made changes.
	* Use basic authentication for the =edit= and =attach= scripts. <a href="TWikiDocumentation#installation">TWiki Installation</a> tells you more about that.
	* Use SSL to authenticate and secure the whole server.

The =REMOTE_USER= environment variable is only set for the scripts that are under authentication. If for example the =edit=, =save= and =preview= scripts are authenticated, but not =view=, you would get your WikiName in =preview= for the =%<nop>WIKIUSERNAME%= variable, but =view= will show =TWikiGuest= instead of your <nop>WikiName.

There is a way to tell TWiki to remember the user for the scripts that are not authenticated, e.g. for the case where the =REMOTE_USER= environment variable is not set. TWiki can be configured to remember the IP address / username pair whenever an authentication happens (edit topic, attach file). Once remembered, the non authenticated scripts like =view= will show the correct username instead of =TWikiGuest=. You can enable this by setting the =$doRememberRemoteUser= flag in =wikicfg.pm=. TWiki persistently stores the IP address / username pairs in file =$remoteUserFilename=, which is ="$dataDir/remoteusers.txt"= by default. Please note that this can fail in case the IP address changes due to dynamically assigned IP addresses or proxy servers. Test: You are %WIKIUSERNAME%.

-- Main.PeterThoeny - 02 Nov 2000 <br>

This topic: TWiki > TWikiUserAuthentication
Topic revision: r1 - 2000-11-02 - PeterThoeny

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