Jekyll Auth

A simple way to use GitHub OAuth to serve a protected jekyll site to your GitHub organization

The problem

Jekyll and GitHub Pages are awesome, right? Static site, lightning fast, everything versioned in Git. What else could you ask for?

But what if you only want to share that site with a select number of people? Before, you were SOL. Now, simply host the site on a free, Heroku Dyno, and whenever someone tries to access it, it will oauth them against GitHub, and make sure they're a member of your Organization. Pretty cool, huh?

Requirements

1. A GitHub account (one per user)
2. A GitHub Organization (of which members will have access to the Jekyll site)
3. A GitHub Application (You can always register one for free)
4. A heroku account

Getting Started

Create a GitHub Application

1. Navigate to the GitHub app registration page
2. Give your app a name
3. Tell GitHub the URL you want the app to eventually live at
4. The Callback Url is your apps's URL + /auth/github/callback
5. Hit Save, but leave the page open, you'll need some of the information in a moment

Add Jekyll Auth to your site

First, add gem 'jekyll-auth' to your Gemfile or if you don't already have a Gemfile, create a file called Gemfile in the root of your site's repository with the following content:

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem 'jekyll-auth'

Next, cd into your project's directory and run bundle install.

Finally, run jekyll-auth new which will run you through everything you need to set up your site with Jekyll Auth.

Whitelisting

Don't want to require authentication for every part of your site? Fine! Add a whitelist to your Jekyll's config.yml file:

jekyll_auth:
  whitelist:
    - drafts?

jekyll_auth.whitelist takes an array of regular expressions as strings. The default auth behavior checks (and blocks) against root (/). Any path defined in the whitelist won't require authentication on your site.

What if you want to go the other way, and unauthenticate the entire site except for certain portions? You can define some regex magic for that:

jekyll_auth:
  whitelist:
    - "^((?!draft).)*$"

Requiring SSL

If you've got SSL set up, simply add the following your your _config.yml file to ensure SSL is enforced.

jekyll_auth:
  ssl: true

Running locally

Want to run it locally?

Without authentication

Just run jekyll serve as you would normally

With authentication

1. export GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=[your github app client id]
2. export GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=[your github app client secret]
3. export GITHUB_ORG_ID=[org id] or export GITHUB_TEAM_ID=[team id]
4. jekyll-auth serve

Pro-top #1: For sanity sake, and to avoid problems with your callback URL, you may want to have two apps, one with a local oauth callback, and one for production if you're going to be testing auth locally.

Pro-tip #2: Jekyll Auth supports dotenv out of the box. You can create a .env file in the root of site and add your configuration variables there. It's ignored by .gitignore if you use jekyll-auth new, but be sure not to accidentally commit your .env file. Here's what your .env file might look like:

GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789
GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=qwertyuiop0001
GITHUB_TEAM_ID=12345

Under the hood

Every time you push to Heroku, we take advantage of the fact that Heroku automatically runs the rake assets:precompile command (normally used for Rails sites) to build our Jekyll site and store it statically, just like GitHub pages would.

Anytime a request comes in for a page, we run it through Sinatra (using the _site folder as the static file folder, just as public would be normally), and authenticate it using sinatra_auth_github.

If they're in the org, they get the page. Otherwise, all they ever get is the bouncer.

Upgrading from Jekyll Auth < 0.1.0

1. cd to your project directory
2. rm config.ru
3. rm Procfile
4. Remove any Jekyll Auth specific requirements from your Gemfile
5. Follow the instructions above to get started
6. When prompted, select "n" if Heroku is already set up