[Dancer-users] best practices: how to require a login for parts of the site...

[Daniel Pittman]

G'day.

One of the requirements I am going to hit in the near future is that we will
need to provide some public and some routes inside a single application.

When users hit anything under a specific path, basically, they need to have an
already validated login, or else we need to send 'em off to get one.  The most
basic "implement a login form" style thing pattern, nothing fancy.


What I am curious about is the "best practice" way to achieve that inside the
scope of Dancer, and how to make it a "drop in" part of other projects if I
end up wanting to advocate wider use of Dancer in the company.


My current model is to provide a plugin akin to this:

package Dancer::Plugin::WithAuth;
my $config = plugin_config;
register with_auth (&) {
    my $handler = shift;
    return sub {
        session('user') or redirect $config->{login_path}, 302;
        goto &$handler;
    };
};
register_plugin;


That then gets used with a route like this:

get '/example/:arg' => with_auth {
    # normal handler here
};


Is this the best approach to take to authentication for parts of the site?

I considered the approach of hooking all requests and performing my own URL
matching to determine if they should require authentication, but that seems to
require that I duplicate an awful lot of code from the Dancer route system.


Alternately, is there some feature of Dancer that I missed which would be
easier to use for this?


Oh.  I did consider this construction, but found it hard to get right,
especially if I wanted to cover '/admin' as well as pages under it.

    get r('/admin/.*') => sub {
        session('user') or redirect '/login', 302;
        pass;
    };

    get '/admin/example' => sub {
        # ...should only be called *after* the first route calls 'pass'
    };

Is that just my messing up or something?

        Daniel
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