Authenticators

The Authenticator is the mechanism for authorizing users. Basic authenticators use simple username and password authentication. JupyterHub ships only with a PAM-based Authenticator, for logging in with local user accounts.

You can use custom Authenticator subclasses to enable authentication via other systems. One such example is using GitHub OAuth.

Because the username is passed from the Authenticator to the Spawner, a custom Authenticator and Spawner are often used together.

See a list of custom Authenticators on the wiki.

Basics of Authenticators

A basic Authenticator has one central method:

Authenticator.authenticate

Authenticator.authenticate(handler, data)

This method is passed the tornado RequestHandler and the POST data from the login form. Unless the login form has been customized, data will have two keys:

• username (self-explanatory)
• password (also self-explanatory)

authenticate‘s job is simple:

• return a username (non-empty str) of the authenticated user if authentication is successful
• return None otherwise

Writing an Authenticator that looks up passwords in a dictionary requires only overriding this one method:

from tornado import gen
from IPython.utils.traitlets import Dict
from jupyterhub.auth import Authenticator

class DictionaryAuthenticator(Authenticator):

    passwords = Dict(config=True,
        help="""dict of username:password for authentication"""
    )

    @gen.coroutine
    def authenticate(self, handler, data):
        if self.passwords.get(data['username']) == data['password']:
            return data['username']

Authenticator.whitelist

Authenticators can specify a whitelist of usernames to allow authentication. For local user authentication (e.g. PAM), this lets you limit which users can login.

Normalizing and validating usernames

Since the Authenticator and Spawner both use the same username, sometimes you want to transform the name coming from the authentication service (e.g. turning email addresses into local system usernames) before adding them to the Hub service. Authenticators can define normalize_username, which takes a username. The default normalization is to cast names to lowercase

For simple mappings, a configurable dict Authenticator.username_map is used to turn one name into another:

c.Authenticator.username_map  = {
  'service-name': 'localname'
}

Validating usernames

In most cases, there is a very limited set of acceptable usernames. Authenticators can define validate_username(username), which should return True for a valid username and False for an invalid one. The primary effect this has is improving error messages during user creation.

The default behavior is to use configurable Authenticator.username_pattern, which is a regular expression string for validation.

To only allow usernames that start with ‘w’:

c.Authenticator.username_pattern = r'w.*'

OAuth and other non-password logins

Some login mechanisms, such as OAuth, don’t map onto username+password. For these, you can override the login handlers.

You can see an example implementation of an Authenticator that uses GitHub OAuth at OAuthenticator.

Writing a custom authenticator

If you are interested in writing a custom authenticator, you can read this tutorial.