Lift Authentication

Question

I want to create an authentication route for my Lift Application.

1. Create a route, for instance www.myapp.com/user/login
2. I am not using Lift forms/templating. The forms are rendered in JS.
3. Send a post request with email and password.
4. Call Lift authentication when that POST request is received.
5. Use the Users.login(email, password) method to validate the credentials.

Q: How do I tell Lift to authenticate the credentials incoming via /user/login?

Answer 1

This is overly simplistic, but something like this will allow you to create a url that you can post to. The JSON extraction is not very safe, but should give you an idea of how this might work.

In Boot.scala

LiftRules.dispatch.append(new RestHelper{
  serve {
    case JsonPost("user" :: "login" :: Nil, (json, _)) =>
      //extract JSON from json object to get username and password
      val userEmail:String = (json \ "username").extract[String]
      val password = (json \ "password").extract[String]
      User.login(userEmail, password) match {
        case Full(r) =>
          User.current(true)
          InMemoryResponse(Array(), Nil, Nil, 200)
        case _ => ForbiddenResponse
      }
  }
})

In User.scala

object User {
  object loggedIn extends SessionVar[Boolean](false)
}

Then you can use if(User.loggedIn.get){ ... } to test if the user is logged in anywhere. This will work for anything added to the stateful dispatch, if you use LiftRules.statelessDispatch the session will not exist.