Basic HTTP authentication with Jersey / Grizzly

Question

I've written a simple REST server using JAX-RS, Jersey and Grizzly. This is how I start the server:

URI baseUri = UriBuilder.fromUri("http://localhost/api")
                        .port(8081)
                        .build();

ResourceConfig rc = new PackagesResourceConfig("se.aioobe.resources");
HttpServer httpServer = GrizzlyServerFactory.createHttpServer(baseUri, rc);

Now I need to protect the resources using Basic HTTP authentication, and I can't figure out how to do this.

I can switch from Grizzly to for instance Jetty if it is simpler to get it to work, but I really value the simple configuration / start up that Grizzly provides.

I've read a lot of tutorials. They all mention the web.xml but in my current configuration I don't have one. (Do I need to add one for HTTP authentication?) I've found the following questions, neither of them is of any help :-(

(No SSL required at this point. The authentication is at this point just to prevent the public from peeking at our beta.)

TL;DR: How do I add basic HTTP authentication to a Jersey / Grizzly webapp?

Solution 1

I managed to get it working after a couple of hours, based on this blog post.

My solution involves:

• Maven artifacts:
  • jersey-server (v 1.17)
  • jersey-grizzly2 (v 1.17)
• Hard coded username / password (replace with database lookup if you like)
• No web.xml (programatically configured server)
• No SSL involved

I created this ContainerRequestFilter:

public class AuthFilter implements ContainerRequestFilter {

    // Exception thrown if user is unauthorized.
    private final static WebApplicationException unauthorized =
       new WebApplicationException(
           Response.status(Status.UNAUTHORIZED)
                   .header(HttpHeaders.WWW_AUTHENTICATE, "Basic realm=\"realm\"")
                   .entity("Page requires login.").build());

    @Override
    public ContainerRequest filter(ContainerRequest containerRequest) 
            throws WebApplicationException {

        // Automatically allow certain requests.
        String method = containerRequest.getMethod();
        String path = containerRequest.getPath(true);
        if (method.equals("GET") && path.equals("application.wadl"))
            return containerRequest;

        // Get the authentication passed in HTTP headers parameters
        String auth = containerRequest.getHeaderValue("authorization");
        if (auth == null)
            throw unauthorized;

        auth = auth.replaceFirst("[Bb]asic ", "");
        String userColonPass = Base64.base64Decode(auth);

        if (!userColonPass.equals("admin:toHah1ooMeor6Oht"))
            throw unauthorized;

        return containerRequest;
    }
}

And I then changed the startup code to include the filter:

URI baseUri = UriBuilder.fromUri("http://localhost/api")
                        .port(8081)
                        .build();

ResourceConfig rc = new PackagesResourceConfig("se.aioobe.resources");

// Add AuthFilter ////////////
rc.getProperties().put("com.sun.jersey.spi.container.ContainerRequestFilters",
                       "<YOUR PACKAGE FOR AuthFilter>.AuthFilter");
//////////////////////////////

HttpServer httpServer = GrizzlyServerFactory.createHttpServer(baseUri, rc);

Solution 2

You may want to check HTTPS Client Server Grizzly sample distributed with Jersey which exactly does that. Here is a gist from that sample on configuring security filters on the Grizzly server.

    WebappContext context = new WebappContext("context");
    ServletRegistration registration = 
            context.addServlet("ServletContainer", ServletContainer.class);
    registration.setInitParameter("com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages",
            "com.sun.jersey.samples.https_grizzly.resource;com.sun.jersey.samples.https_grizzly.auth");

    // add security filter (which handles http basic authentication)
    registration.setInitParameter(ResourceConfig.PROPERTY_CONTAINER_REQUEST_FILTERS,
            "com.sun.jersey.samples.https_grizzly.auth.SecurityFilter;com.sun.jersey.api.container.filter.LoggingFilter");
    registration.setInitParameter(ResourceConfig.PROPERTY_CONTAINER_RESPONSE_FILTERS,
            LoggingFilter.class.getName());


    try {

        webServer = GrizzlyServerFactory.createHttpServer(
                getBaseURI()
        );

        // start Grizzly embedded server //
        System.out.println("Jersey app started. Try out " + BASE_URI + "\nHit CTRL + C to stop it...");
        context.deploy(webServer);
        webServer.start();

    } catch (Exception ex) {
        System.out.println(ex.getMessage());
    }

You are registering a SecurityFilter which takes care of your HTTP basic auth. Enabling logging filter on the server should show basic auth header in the request. Here is an example:

Jan 30, 2013 8:59:00 PM com.sun.jersey.api.container.filter.LoggingFilter filter
INFO: 1 * Server in-bound request
1 > GET http://localhost:8080/context/
1 > host: localhost:8080
1 > connection: keep-alive
1 > cache-control: max-age=0
1 > authorization: Basic dXNlcjpwYXNzd29yZA==
1 > accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
1 > user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.57 Safari/537.17
1 > accept-encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
1 > accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.8
1 > accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
1 > 

Service: GET / User: user
Jan 30, 2013 8:59:00 PM com.sun.jersey.api.container.filter.LoggingFilter$Adapter finish
INFO: 1 * Server out-bound response
1 < 200
1 < Content-Type: text/html
1 < 
JERSEY HTTPS EXAMPLE

Comments

[aioobe]

Thanks! I did look into that. I couldn't get it to compile, even after installing a bunch of jar-files manually in my mvn repository. I did get it working in the end based on similar code. I'll post an answer in a minute or so.