how to – Romesh Malinga Perera

Setting up basic authentication for DBfit with Nginx

by Romesh Maling Perera
July 13, 2015July 13, 2015

First you need to install Nginx in the server. I performed this in a Ubuntu server and following commands need to be altered according to the OS if you are not a Ubuntu user. This setup has two main parts. First we will install Nginx and then we will move towards the basic authentication setup for DBfit with Nginx.

Setting up Nginx (extremely straightforward)

sudo apt-get install nginx

sudo service nginx start

This should install Nginx in the Ubuntu machine. But unlucky I got the following error [If you got it installed and started correctly without any errors, you can skip this section]

Starting nginx: nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] still could not bind()

This happened due to the default file in the sites-available folder. You can simply remove the default file symbolic link in the sites-enabled folder and give another start to the nginx. This time it started without any issue.

Developing “Keep Me Logged In” / “Remember me” / “Stay signed in”option

by Romesh Maling Perera
January 21, 2015January 21, 2015
1 Comment

I recently had to develop above feature couple of times in past few weeks. I came across several issues while implementing this feature. Most of these issues did not have any thing do with the programming language I used (i.e. they are not implementation related issues) but had to do with the concept of development (i.e. design issues). As these are concept level issues, I can make this article more abstract and do not have to couple with a programming language I used (PHP). However will show some code segments in PHP + pseudo, which will be very basic and can be easily translated to any other language.

First, I must emphasize that this method is based on one basic idea. “DO NOT PUT USER DATA IN COOKIE”, even in encrypted format. If you are OK with putting some user data in the cookie, because you believe that encryption cannot be broken or the information is useless to an attacker, jump to the “Not Recommended but Easy Solution” section at the end of the article