Flutterby™! : Perl OpenID quickstart 2009-03-25 20:48:23.192046+00

Perl OpenID quickstart

2009-03-25 20:48:23.192046+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

Dear Lazy Web, for a while I was trying to keep up with OpenID, but after a while the absurdity and silliness just got to be too damned much. I know that 1.1 is now deprecated, 2.0 is deployed, 2.something fixes some allegedly heinous issues, and I have no idea what people in the wild are running. In migrating away from MediaWiki on Flutterby.net, I'll also be giving up the OpenID plug-in, and since I've logged into some stuff using it I should probably keep that URL live.

I need two things:

What's the simplest way to put together a CGI OpenID login in Perl? Prefer "download this tar package into a directory, edit 'login.cgi' to add your password, point your browser to the login.cgi" style.
What's the line I put in the headers of the document at my OpenID address that I point to that with?

You might just want to create an account at one of the free OpenID providers and user OpenID delegation for that URL.

+1 for delegation; I've been doing that on genehack.org for a while now and it's really just hella simpler (and I say that as somebody who leans pretty hard towards the DIY side of the spectrum when it comes to this sort of thing).

I've now changed it to dump that stuff out through my CMS, which is putting in empty element bodies for the link tag.

Oh, wait, LJ at least sends me off to the MyOpenID login page, but then says: "no_identity_server: The provided URL doesn't declare its OpenID identity server.". I remember there was something about my server needing to redeclare itself, but I don't see that right off. I guess I'll just throw this site over to the live site and see what happens the first time I try to post a comment.

Hmm...your headers look fine to me, and the fact that some sites work better than others is suspicious. support@myopenid.com is usually pretty responsive about these sort of things -- if they're not, email me :)

I whined about the fact that OpenID is a byzantine collection of horrendous crap recently on the OpenID list, so I didn't actually expect that any of the first two pages for "openid test" didn't work. I'll just ignore it 'til I actually need to use it.

A few years ago I wrote what was supposed to be the canonical test code for the "YADIS" discovery portion of OpenID. That code apparently got dropped by the client of the client that I wrote it for, and the spec has ~~evolved~~ grown since those days, but even then it was apparent that many of the folks pushing features into OpenID didn't have a handle on pragmatic implementation details, and weren't looking at the problems which needed solutions but were chasing which ways they could make people use their buzzwords.

And, yeah, given that I can redirect the delegation pretty much anywhere from the URL I provide, then who provides it becomes a commodity. I wouldn't use a delegated OpenID for anything critical, but for blog comments I'm happy to let Verisign or JanRain be the keeper of that password.