Present Perfect

After piecing together the security story of CouchDB as it applies to mushin, I secured the mushin database on various machines. This serves as a quick setup guide for security for mushin, but I think it's useful for other people using CouchDB.

Stop using Admin Party

This is easy to do in Futon (link only works if you run couchdb locally on port 5984, as per default). Jan's blog post explains it perfectly, including screenshots.

Under the hood, couchdb will actually rewrite your local.ini file to add this user - all admin users are stored in the config files. (I'm sure there's an obvious reason for that)

Given that you most likely will use this password in Futon, make sure you pick a unique password - as far as I can tell this password goes over the wire.

Create a user object for your user

explains the basics. You need to create or update the _users database, which is a special couchdb database. You can get to it in Futon. If, like most people, you're still on a couchdb before 1.2.0, you have to fiddle yourself to calculate the password_sha field, but at least the page explains how to do it. Not the most user-friendly thing to do in the world, so I'm considering adding commands for this to a different application I'm working on.

Allow this user to read and write to the mushin database

Again, the best reference is the CouchDB wiki, but the information is easy to miss.
Every database has a _security object under the database name; in the case of mushin, you can get to it in Futon. _security is a special document that does not get versioned, and doesn't show up in listings either. In fact, it is so special that Futon doesn't let you change it; when you click save it just resets. So your only option is to PUT the document, for example:

curl -X PUT -d @security.json http://admin:sup3rs3kr3t@localhost:5984/mushin/_security

Oops, see what I did there ? I had to specify my admin password on the command line, and now it's in my shell history. I did tell you to choose a unique one because it's going to be all over the place, didn't I ?

security.json is just the contents of the _security document; just adapt the example on the wiki, and put your user under readers, and leave the role empty for now.

test denial

This one is simple; just try to GET the database:

$ curl http://localhost:5984/mushin
{"error":"unauthorized","reason":"You are not authorized to access this db."}

If you did it right, you should see the same error. If you're brave, you can retry the same curl command, but add your username and password. But you know how we feel about that.

After piecing together the security story of CouchDB as it applies to mushin, I secured the mushin database on various machines. This serves as a quick setup guide for security...