Log in a user at application start up

Question

I am using latest Grails and the spring security plugin. I would like to log in a predefined guest user at application start up but not sure how to achieve this.

1. How do I programmatically log in a user? (I'm attempting this in bootstrap but can not find what to import for the AuthToken class)
2. Where is this best done - i.e. in the bootstrap config?

Answer 1

Okay I found a solution... it's a bit raw, and I'm not sure this is the best place for it at application startup, but it achieves what I wanted.

So in Bootstrap file I have implemented the following:

Here's my imports:-

import grails.plugin.springsecurity.rest.token.AccessToken
import grails.plugin.springsecurity.rest.token.generation.TokenGenerator
import org.springframework.security.authentication.AuthenticationManager
import org.springframework.security.authentication.BadCredentialsException
import org.springframework.security.core.Authentication
import org.springframework.security.core.context.SecurityContextHolder
import org.springframework.security.authentication.UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken
import org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.UserDetails

...after all bootstrapping of my user I want to auto log in a Guest user and then generate the JWT refresh and access token too...

    /* Login in guest user on application startup */
    UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken token = new UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken("guest", "guest");
    token.setDetails(tttGuest);
    try {
        //doing actual authentication
        Authentication auth = authenticationManager.authenticate(token);
        log.debug("Login succeeded!");
        //setting principal in context
        SecurityContextHolder.getContext().setAuthentication(auth);

        //Generate JWT access token and refresh token
        AccessToken accessToken = tokenGenerator.generateAccessToken(springSecurityService.principal as UserDetails)

        return true
    } catch (BadCredentialsException e) {
        log.debug("Login failed")
        return false
    }

The only part left to do is to figure out how to communicated the tokens back to the client application.