Keeping user accounts consolidated

[Chuck Esterbrook]

I have a Trac installation (0.11b1 on Linux) that's working quite
well, but I haven't opened it up to the public for posting. I was
pointed in the right direction for doing so per
http://groups.google.com/group/trac-users/browse_thread/thread/d8a09fd4616167de/58c95f16541b1bcd?lnk=gst&q=esterbrook#58c95f16541b1bcd

But I also have a phpBB3 installation that's working quite well and
has been accumulating accounts and posts since before I set up Trac.

So now my concern is having two sets of accounts for the same site.
Maybe I could migrate the discussion forums to Trac? I found
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/DiscussionPlugin and it looks like a great
start. But there's a big enough gap between phpBB3 and it that I think
I'm staying with phpBB3 for now. See various RFEs at
http://trac-hacks.org/report/9?COMPONENT=DiscussionPlugin

I'd like to avoid having users create two accounts. It seems like
options include at least:

-- A Trac Hack I don't know about.

-- My own hack to have Trac read another database for user logins (but
within the same server, so maybe not too bad). I don't know if this is
feasible as Trac may wish to write information back. Then again, maybe
I can take that over too.

-- Perhaps a hacky cron job that copies account information from the
forums db to the Trac db.

Does anyone have experience or advice on linking Trac accounts to
another web application on the same site?


Thanks,
Chuck

[martin....@selex-comms.com]

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[John Hampton]

Chuck Esterbrook wrote:
> -- My own hack to have Trac read another database for user logins (but
> within the same server, so maybe not too bad). I don't know if this is
> feasible as Trac may wish to write information back. Then again, maybe
> I can take that over too.

Your best bet is to create an IPasswordStore implementation. This way
you can configure the account manager plugin to use your backend and
have your backend grab user/password info from the phpBB installation.

As I have never used phpBB before, I don't know how hard this will be,
but assuming that all phpBB does is store username/password hashes in a
DB that you have access to, then it'll be easy.

The documentation for the IPasswordStore interface is here:

http://trac-hacks.org/browser/accountmanagerplugin/trunk/acct_mgr/api.py#L15

Also, if you have any questions, hop on #trac. There are generally
multiple people there that have had experience with implementing
IPasswordStore.

-John

[Emmanuel Blot]

If phpBB support LDAP, you could use LDAP for
authentication/permissions for Trac.

--
Manu