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The ACTION of the form must be /LOGIN (or whatever you defined in your
server configuration as handled by the ->login() method - see example
in the SYNOPSIS section).

=item 2.

The various user input fields (username, passwords, etc.) must be
named 'credential_0', 'credential_1', etc. on the form.  These will
get passed to your authen_cred() method.

=item 3.

You must define a form field called 'destination' that tells
AuthCookie where to redirect the request after successfully logging
in.  Typically this value is obtained from C<$r-E<gt>prev-E<gt>uri>.
See the login.pl script in t/eg/.

=back

In addition, you might want your login page to be able to tell why
the user is being asked to log in.  In other words, if the user sent
bad credentials, then it might be useful to display an error message
saying that the given username or password are invalid.  Also, it
might be useful to determine the difference between a user that sent
an invalid auth cookie, and a user that sent no auth cookie at all.  To
cope with these situations, B<AuthCookie> will set
C<$r-E<gt>subprocess_env('AuthCookieReason')> to one of the following values.

=over 4

=item I<no_cookie>

The user presented no cookie at all.  Typically this means the user is
trying to log in for the first time.

=item I<bad_cookie>

The cookie the user presented is invalid.  Typically this means that the user
is not allowed access to the given page.

=item I<bad_credentials>

The user tried to log in, but the credentials that were passed are invalid.

=back

You can examine this value in your login form by examining
C<$r-E<gt>prev-E<gt>subprocess_env('AuthCookieReason')> (because it's
a sub-request).

Of course, if you want to give more specific information about why
access failed when a cookie is present, your C<authen_ses_key()>
method can set arbitrary entries in C<$r-E<gt>subprocess_env>.

=head1 THE LOGOUT SCRIPT

If you want to let users log themselves out (something that can't be
done using Basic Auth), you need to create a logout script.  For an example,
see t/htdocs/docs/logout.pl.  Logout scripts may want to take advantage of
AuthCookie's C<logout()> method, which will set the proper cookie headers in
order to clear the user's cookie.  This usually looks like
C<$r-E<gt>auth_type-E<gt>logout($r);>.

Note that if you don't necessarily trust your users, you can't count
on cookie deletion for logging out.  You'll have to expire some
server-side login information too.  AuthCookie doesn't do this for
you, you have to handle it yourself.

=head1 ABOUT SESSION KEYS

Unlike the sample AuthCookieHandler, you have you verify the user's
login and password in C<authen_cred()>, then you do something
like:

    my $date = localtime;
    my $ses_key = MD5->hexhash(join(';', $date, $PID, $PAC));

save C<$ses_key> along with the user's login, and return C<$ses_key>.

Now C<authen_ses_key()> looks up the C<$ses_key> passed to it and
returns the saved login.  I use Oracle to store the session key and
retrieve it later, see the ToDo section below for some other ideas.

=head2 TO DO

=over 4

=item *

It might be nice if the logout method could accept some parameters
that could make it easy to redirect the user to another URI, or
whatever.  I'd have to think about the options needed before I
implement anything, though.

=back

=head1 HISTORY

Originally written by Eric Bartley <bartley@purdue.edu>

versions 2.x were written by Ken Williams <ken@forum.swarthmore.edu>

=head1 COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2000 Ken Williams. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself.

=head1 SEE ALSO

L<Apache2::AuthCookie::Base>

=head1 SOURCE

The development version is on github at L<https://github.com/mschout/apache-authcookie>
and may be cloned from L<https://github.com/mschout/apache-authcookie.git>

=head1 BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests on the bugtracker website
L<https://github.com/mschout/apache-authcookie/issues>

When submitting a bug or request, please include a test-file or a
patch to an existing test-file that illustrates the bug or desired
feature.

=head1 AUTHOR

Michael Schout <mschout@cpan.org>

=head1 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2000 by Ken Williams.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

=cut