PmWiki has built-in support for password-protecting various areas of the wiki site. Passwords can be applied to individual pages, to WikiGroups, or to the entire wiki site. Note that the password protection mechanisms described here are only a small part of overall system (and wiki) security, see PmWiki.Security for more discussion of this.

PmWiki supports three levels of access to wiki pages:

read passwords allow viewing the contents of wiki pages

edit passwords control editing and modification of wiki pages

attr passwords control who is able to set passwords on pages (and potentially other future attributes)

Finally, there is an admin access for the entire wiki site that allows an administrator to override the passwords set for any individual page or group. All passwords are stored in an encrypted format so that other users on the system cannot simply browse the contents of files to determine the passwords.

By default, PmWiki is configured with empty read and edit passwords for the whole site (allowing anyone to view or edit pages), the attr password is locked for the Main and PmWiki groups, and the admin password is locked entirely. Global passwords for the wiki site are controlled by the $DefaultPasswords array in local.php. To set an admin password to "mysecret" for a site, you can add the following line to local.php:

        $DefaultPasswords['admin'] = crypt('mysecret'); 

Of course, anyone able to view local.php would be able to find out your secret password, so we'd like to encrypt it somehow. Add ?action=crypt to the end of any PmWiki URL (or jump to ThisWiki?:?action=crypt) and you'll be presented with a form to give you the encrypted form of the password. For example, when the crypt action is given the password "mysecret", PmWiki gives back the string like "$1$hMMhCdfT$mZSCh.BJOidMRn4SOUUSi1". This can then be put directly into local.php as:

         $DefaultPasswords['admin'] = '$1$hMMhCdfT$mZSCh.BJOidMRn4SOUUSi1'; 

Note that the encrypted password has to be enclosed in single-quotes. Here, the password is still "mysecret", but somebody looking at local.php won't be able to see that just from looking at the encrypted form. Note that crypt may give you different encryptions for the same password--this is normal (and makes it harder for someone else to determine the original password).

Similarly, you can set $DefaultPasswords['read'], $DefaultPasswords['edit'], and $DefaultPasswords['attr'] to control default read, edit, and attr passwords for the entire site. The default passwords are used only for pages and groups which do not have passwords set. Also, any of these values may be arrays of encrypted passwords.

In PmWiki, page passwords override group passwords, group passwords override the default passwords, and the admin password overrides all passwords. This gives a great deal of flexibility in controlling access to wiki pages in PmWiki. At present there isn't any way to have a non-password protected page within a password-protected group, or a non-password protected group with a site-wide default password set.

To use PmWiki itself to set passwords on individual wiki pages and WikiGroups, see PmWiki.Passwords.

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Page last modified on March 12, 2003, at 08:50 PM