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CouchDB: The Definitive Guide
book

CouchDB: The Definitive Guide

by J. Chris Anderson, Jan Lehnardt, Noah Slater
January 2010
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
272 pages
6h 41m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from CouchDB: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 22. Security

We mentioned earlier that CouchDB is still in development and that features may have been added since the publication of this book. This is especially true for the security mechanisms in CouchDB. There is rudimentary support in the currently released versions (0.10.0), but as we’re writing these lines, additions are being discussed.

In this chapter, we’ll look at the basic security mechanisms in CouchDB: the Admin Party, Basic Authentication, Cookie Authentication, and OAuth.

The Admin Party

When you start out fresh, CouchDB allows any request to be made by anyone. Create a database? No problem, here you go. Delete some documents? Same deal. CouchDB calls this the Admin Party. Everybody has privileges to do anything. Neat.

While it is incredibly easy to get started with CouchDB that way, it should be obvious that putting a default installation into the wild is adventurous. Any rogue client could come along and delete a database.

A note of relief: by default, CouchDB will listen only on your loopback network interface (127.0.0.1 or localhost) and thus only you will be able to make requests to CouchDB, nobody else. But when you start to open up your CouchDB to the public (that is, by telling it to bind to your machine’s public IP address), you will want to think about restricting access so that the next bad guy doesn’t ruin your admin party.

In our previous discussions, w dropped some keywords about how things without the admin party work. First, there’s admin itself, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596158156Errata Page