Although the Linux server I use is physically located in the same room as my development machine, I thought to explore Blazor security when creating my deployment app. This post shows the results of that endeavour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The standard creation wizard for Blazor Web Apps available in Visual Studio contains an option for setting the Authentication type<\/em>. If this is set to “Individual accounts”, username-password-based authentication is added to your app using the ASP.NET Core Identity<\/a> framework. While the resulting app is fully functional, it is also quite complex, imposing a structure on application navigation and needing a server database for the usernames and roles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I desired a much simpler approach for my app. I already had the ability to use a Linux command line to deploy my apps on the server. Once I had logged in to the server, Linux used my user settings to control access to the Apache configuration area and the use of commands such as systemctl<\/em>. If my deployment app could leverage the same controls I would not need special database that I would need to maintain just for that purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had originally thought to modify the Authentication type<\/em> “Individual accounts” app, overriding the necessary components to replace the username database with a “query” against the Linux password file. This turned out to be much harder than creating the security mechanism from scratch. I did make use of some of that generated code in my simplified app.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The “Individual accounts” app provides several features that I did not need:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the feature that brings the most complexity is the least obvious – the fact that the generated app supports the persistence of the authentication state across page loads. This will be explained a bit further on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The environment is the same as with the previous post:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
Environment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Source Code<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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