Question

I’ve been playing with Iris Couch using Futon, curl and reading the CouchDB security Wiki page and I’m a little confused about readers, admins & server admins.

Am I correct in saying that the “Create Server Admin” pop-up in Futon isn’t actually creating a server admin, (the wiki mentions this is only done by editing a local.ini file)?

What you’re really doing is creating documents in the _users database – giving users a username & password to authenticate with, after which their name or role is compared to any names/roles defined against a database security object?

Also, I noticed that the “require_valid_user” is set to false by default, so assuming Iris Couch has a server admin, does this mean that although users have to provide their username/password to authenticate – they’re validated as anonymous, so no comparison is made against any database-defined security?

If I want to restrict a user to a specific database, do I need the “require_valid_user” setting to be set to true?

Cheers

Answer 1

When you use the “Create server admin” popup form, that is the same as editing the .ini files. (Internally, Futon will query the a /_config URL which is an HTTP API to edit the .ini files.)

The _users database is the authoritative location for all user acounts, their passwords, and their roles. When a user queries CouchDB with a password (or with a session cookie), that name and role will be used to grant or deny their query. The decision of whether to allow or disallow their query is made by checking the _security object in the database first. They must be in the “readers” section: either their name is in the “names” list, or their role must be in the “roles” list.

I recommend that you avoid the require_valid_user option. It is for very specialized situations.