Using Google FriendConnect for Authentication

The idea of this article is how to let user sign in to your site by using Google Friend Connect. This is a summarize steps to integrate the JS API to a Grails app and based on instruction for "Give users an option of logging in with Friend Connect".




1. Register your site with Google Friend Connect . You must register your site with Google Friend Connect to get your site ID. We will need the site ID to use with the Friend Connect API.


2. Include Friend Connect library
Refer to this page for the full outlines of the Javascript API.
  google.load('friendconnect', '0.8');

4. Render Login Button.
google.friendconnect.renderSignInButton({ 'id': 'target-id', 'text' : 'Click here to join ', 'style': 'standard' });

5. Using OpenSocialApi to detect if user already login.

google.friendconnect.container.loadOpenSocialApi({
  site: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
  onload: function() {
    if (!window.timesloaded) {
      window.timesloaded = 1;
    } else {
      window.timesloaded++;
    }
    if (window.timesloaded > 1) {

      // no need to handle this for now
      //window.top.location.href = "/authenticate.html";
    }
  }
});

6. Get user ID.

To obtain the login user, first initiate a data request for "VIEWER".

   var req = opensocial.newDataRequest();
    req.add(req.newFetchPersonRequest("VIEWER"), "viewer_data");
    req.send(onData);

The request will run the callback "onData" when it receive data back from the server.

Next we need to handle the callback from the request for the "VIEWER" information.

   function onData(data) {
      if (!data.get("viewer_data").hadError()) {
         var owner_data = data.get("viewer_data").getData();
         var name = owner_data.getDisplayName();
         var id = owner_data.getId();
         window.location.href = "/auth/checkfriendconnect?id=" + id;
       }
    }

The owner ID is unique to the person and will be used for us to tied in to the user in our system.

The next line, "window.location.href = "/auth/checkfriendconnect?id=" + id;" we are actually redirecting the browser to another page for the Friend Connect ID check by using the ID as a params.

7. Back in the server, query the user for Friend Connect ID with the ID specified and perform the usual login processing once the ID is matched to a user.

Setting up mail for your Ubuntu server

Need your bare-bones Ubuntu server to send out email notification and the like? Well, first you need to check what your hostname is and modify accordingly:

hostname -f

So my server's hostname is microdude, you might also get it as microdude.localdomain. You'll want to convert it into an FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). That means I need to change my microdude to microdude.favoritemedium.com.

sudo vi /etc/hostname
sudo vi /etc/hosts

The output of hosts:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 microdude.localdomain microdude

Would now be:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 microdude.favoritemedium.com microdude

Reboot and check that the hostname has been changed to microdude.favoritemedium.com:

sudo reboot
hostname -f

After that, you're supposed to set up RDNS (Reverse Domain Name System), this helps avoid your mails falling prey to the all-powerful spam filter. You can check on this RDNS with dig which can be installed from this package:

sudo apt-get install dnsutils

This is optional, though if your mails start going into the spam folder, you'd best revisit this in the links provided.

Now to install the actual mail agent onto the server with a one-liner operation:

sudo tasksel install mail-server

The process stops at two points for user input. The first is to pick the postfix configuration for the server, select the default Internet site. The second is to set the main domain name, this should be already be filled with microdude.favoritemedium.com and all you need to do is accept.

Once finished, the postfix daemon should be running now. You need to know about two files, the main configuration file and the mail log. You don't need to mess around with the config file, since that should be set up correctly. The mail log is useful to check on whether mails have been sent or other information. Their locations:

/etc/postfix/main.cf
/var/log/mail.log

Now you'll want to test whether mails can be sent out. An email can be typed out in the terminal using the mail command:

mail testing@mailaddress.com
Subject: Do not panic, this is a test
Panic panic panic panic panic
.
Cc:

Check the email account you sent the mail to and you should see that it is present.

Congratulations, you can now spam to your heart's content =^_^=.

From:

• http://articles.slicehost.com/email
• http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/7/28/email-preparing-the-slice
• http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/7/29/postfix-installation
• http://articles.slicehost.com/2010/3/1/barebones-postfix-install-for-ubuntu

Moving Drupal from one host to another

You've got a Drupal site running and now want to move it to another server which is bare-bones. This server is luckily running Ubuntu, which makes installing the rest of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack a one-line operation:

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

The install process will stop at one point to ask for the password of the root user for MySQL. Once the install completes, use the MySQL command-line client to add in the same database (an empty one) and user that Drupal uses.

Use mysqldump to dump out the Drupal database data into an sql file. Load it in the new database, populating it. You'll want to tar up the whole directory where the Drupal files reside (not forgetting the .htaccess) and expand it out in the same location within the new machine. You may (not) need to edit sites/default/settings.php or .htaccess for any host information changes. settings.php is also where you edit the database login information, if you decide to use different ones.

With Apache running, you should be able to hit the new Drupal site. It looks to be running but there are a few gotchas. If you are (most likely) running Clean URLs, the links don't work anymore. You'll need to disable it to get navigation working at http://hostname/?q=admin/settings/clean-urls, maybe going through http://hostname/?q=user to log in first. To set up Clean URLs again, you need to run this line:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

And edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default, changing the AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All inside the directory with the path /var/www, or where the Drupal files live. Restart the server and you find that you can enable Clean URLs now.

The other gotcha is that the status report is complaining it can't find the PHP GD library. Apparently PHP library is installed but not configured so you run these lines:

sudo apt-get install php5 (optional?)
sudo apt-get install php5-gd

Lastly, cron needs to be set up to update the Drupal site. I use curl so the lines are:

sudo apt-get install curl
crontab -e
0 * * * * curl --silent --compressed http://localhost/cron.php

The last line is done inside the vi editor so after that, save and quit.

Congratulations! Your Drupal site is now running fine on the new machine.