Basic Authentication Plugin

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":{ 
   "blockUnknown": true, 
   "class":"solr.BasicAuthPlugin",
   "credentials":{"solr":"IV0EHq1OnNrj6gvRCwvFwTrZ1+z1oBbnQdiVC3otuq0= Ndd7LKvVBAaZIF0QAVi1ekCfAJXr1GGfLtRUXhgrF8c="}, 
   "realm":"My Solr users", 
   "forwardCredentials": false 
},
"authorization":{
   "class":"solr.RuleBasedAuthorizationPlugin",
   "permissions":[{"name":"security-edit",
      "role":"admin"}], 
   "user-role":{"solr":"admin"} 
}}

There are several things defined in this file:

1Basic authentication and rule-based authorization plugins are enabled.
2The parameter "blockUnknown":true means that unauthenticated requests are not allowed to pass through.
3A user called 'solr', with a password 'SolrRocks' has been defined.
4We override the realm property to display another text on the login prompt.
5The parameter "forwardCredentials":false means we let Solr’s PKI authenticaion handle distributed request instead of forwarding the Basic Auth header.
6The 'admin' role has been defined, and it has permission to edit security settings.
7The '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 realm is not defined, it will default to solr.

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
If you have defined ZK_HOST in solr.in.sh/solr.in.cmd (see instructions) you can omit -z <zk host string> from the above command.

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 Basic 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

  • v1: http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authentication

  • v2: http://localhost:8983/api/cluster/security/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:

V1 API

curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d '{"set-user": {"tom":"TomIsCool", "harry":"HarrysSecret"}}'

V2 API

curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/api/cluster/security/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.

V1 API

curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d  '{"delete-user": ["tom", "harry"]}'

V2 API

curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/api/cluster/security/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d  '{"delete-user": ["tom", "harry"]}'

Set a Property

Set properties for the authentication plugin. The currently supported properties for the Basic Authentication plugin are blockUnknown, realm and forwardCredentials.

V1 API

curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d  '{"set-property": {"blockUnknown":false}}'

V2 API

curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/api/cluster/security/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d  '{"set-property": {"blockUnknown":false}}'

The authentication realm defaults to solr and is displayed in the WWW-Authenticate HTTP header and in the Admin UI login page. To change the realm, set the realm property:

V1 API

curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d  '{"set-property": {"realm":"My Solr users"}}'

V2 API

curl --user solr:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/api/cluster/security/authentication -H 'Content-type:application/json' -d  '{"set-property": {"realm":"My Solr users"}}'

Using Basic Auth with SolrJ

There are two main ways to use SolrJ with Solr servers protected by basic authentication: either the permissions can be set on each individual request, or the underlying http client can be configured to add credentials to all requests that it sends.

Per-Request Basic Auth Credentials

The simplest way to setup basic authentication in SolrJ is use the setBasicAuthCredentials method on 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);

While this is method is simple, it can often be inconvenient to ensure the credentials are provided everywhere they’re needed. It also doesn’t work with the many SolrClient methods which don’t consume SolrRequest objects.

Global (JVM) Basic Auth Credentials

Alternatively, users can use SolrJ’s PreemptiveBasicAuthClientBuilderFactory to add basic authentication credentials to all requests automatically. To enable this feature, users should set the following system property -Dsolr.httpclient.builder.factory=org.apache.solr.client.solrj.impl.PreemptiveBasicAuthClientBuilderFactory. PreemptiveBasicAuthClientBuilderFactory allows applications to provide credentials in two different ways:

  1. The basicauth system property can be passed, containing the credentials directly (e.g., -Dbasicauth=username:password). This option is straightforward, but may expose the credentials in the command line, depending on how they’re set.

  2. The solr.httpclient.config system property can be passed, containing a path to a properties file holding the credentials. Inside this file the username and password can be specified as httpBasicAuthUser and httpBasicAuthPassword, respectively.

    httpBasicAuthUser=my_username
httpBasicAuthPassword=secretPassword

Using the Solr Control Script with Basic Auth

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"