Solr can support Basic authentication for users with the use of the BasicAuthPlugin.
An authorization plugin is also available to configure Solr with permissions to perform various activities in the system. The authorization plugin is described in the section Rule-Based Authorization Plugin.
Enable Basic Authentication
To use Basic authentication, you must first create a security.json
file. This file and where to put it is described in detail in the section Enable Plugins with security.json.
For Basic authentication, the security.json
file must have an authentication
part which defines the class being used for authentication. Usernames and passwords (as a sha256(password+salt) hash) could be added when the file is created, or can be added later with the Basic authentication API, described below.
The authorization
part is not related to Basic authentication, but is a separate authorization plugin designed to support fine-grained user access control. For more information, see the section Rule-Based Authorization Plugin.
An example security.json
showing both sections is shown below to show how these plugins can work together:
{
"authentication":{ (1)
"blockUnknown": true, (2)
"class":"solr.BasicAuthPlugin",
"credentials":{"solr":"IV0EHq1OnNrj6gvRCwvFwTrZ1+z1oBbnQdiVC3otuq0= Ndd7LKvVBAaZIF0QAVi1ekCfAJXr1GGfLtRUXhgrF8c="} (3)
},
"authorization":{
"class":"solr.RuleBasedAuthorizationPlugin",
"permissions":[{"name":"security-edit",
"role":"admin"}], (4)
"user-role":{"solr":"admin"} (5)
}}
There are several things defined in this file:
1 | Basic authentication and rule-based authorization plugins are enabled. |
2 | The parameter "blockUnknown":true means that unauthenticated requests are not allowed to pass through. |
3 | A user called 'solr', with a password 'SolrRocks' has been defined. |
4 | The 'admin' role has been defined, and it has permission to edit security settings. |
5 | The 'solr' user has been defined to the 'admin' role. |
Save your settings to a file called security.json
locally. If you are using Solr in standalone mode, you should put this file in $SOLR_HOME
.
If blockUnknown
does not appear in the security.json
file, it will default to false
. This has the effect of not requiring authentication at all. In some cases, you may want this; for example, if you want to have security.json
in place but aren’t ready to enable authentication. However, you will want to ensure that this parameter is set to true
in order for authentication to be truly enabled in your system.
If you are using SolrCloud, you must upload security.json
to ZooKeeper. You can use this example command, ensuring that the ZooKeeper port is correct:
bin/solr zk cp file:path_to_local_security.json zk:/security.json -z localhost:9983
Caveats
There are a few things to keep in mind when using the Basic authentication plugin.
-
Credentials are sent in plain text by default. It’s recommended to use SSL for communication when Basic authentication is enabled, as described in the section Enabling SSL.
-
A user who has access to write permissions to
security.json
will be able to modify all the permissions and how users have been assigned permissions. Special care should be taken to only grant access to editing security to appropriate users. -
Your network should, of course, be secure. Even with Basic authentication enabled, you should not unnecessarily expose Solr to the outside world.
Editing Authentication Plugin Configuration
An Authentication API allows modifying user IDs and passwords. The API provides an endpoint with specific commands to set user details or delete a user.
API Entry Point
admin/authentication
This endpoint is not collection-specific, so users are created for the entire Solr cluster. If users need to be restricted to a specific collection, that can be done with the authorization rules.
Add a User or Edit a Password
The set-user
command allows you to add users and change their passwords. For example, the following defines two users and their passwords:
curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d '{
"set-user": {"tom" : "TomIsCool" ,
"harry":"HarrysSecret"}}'
Delete a User
The delete-user
command allows you to remove a user. The user password does not need to be sent to remove a user. In the following example, we’ve asked that user IDs 'tom' and 'harry' be removed from the system.
curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d '{
"delete-user": ["tom","harry"]}'
Set a Property
Set arbitrary properties for authentication plugin. The only supported property is 'blockUnknown'
curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d '{
"set-property": {"blockUnknown":false}}'
Using BasicAuth with SolrJ
In SolrJ, the basic authentication credentials need to be set for each request as in this example:
SolrRequest req ;//create a new request object
req.setBasicAuthCredentials(userName, password);
solrClient.request(req);
Query example:
QueryRequest req = new QueryRequest(new SolrQuery("*:*"));
req.setBasicAuthCredentials(userName, password);
QueryResponse rsp = req.process(solrClient);
Using Command Line scripts with BasicAuth
Add the following line to the solr.in.sh
or solr.in.cmd
file. This example tells the bin/solr
command line to to use "basic" as the type of authentication, and to pass credentials with the user-name "solr" and password "SolrRocks":
SOLR_AUTH_TYPE="basic"
SOLR_AUTHENTICATION_OPTS="-Dbasicauth=solr:SolrRocks"
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