mod_auth_openid on OSX

I wanted to play with mod_auth_openid on my Macbook Pro. OS X ships with Apache installed, so all I needed to do was build the module and edit the Apache configuration.

I wasn’t able to build mod_auth_openid from the git repository because of issues with autotools on OSX, but I was able to build from the latest release tarball (in this case, mod_auth_openid-0.7.tar.gz).

mod_auth_openid needs libopkele (a C++ OpenID library), which can be installed via Homebrew:

brew install libopkele

My initial attempt to build mod_auth_openid failed with:

/usr/share/apr-1/build-1/libtool: line 4575: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/OSX10.8.xctoolchain/usr/bin/cc: No such file or directory

For some reason, there’s a reference in an Apache config file to a non-existent path for the C compiler. I tried to edit the file in question, but that failed to resolve the issue. In the end, I just added a symlink:

cd /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains
sudo ln -s XcodeDefault.xctoolchain OSX10.8.xctoolchain

Then it was just configure, make, sudo make install.

I then created a /Library/WebServer/Documents/protected directory with an index.html file inside and configured Apache to only allow access via OpenID by adding the following to /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents/protected">
    AuthType OpenID
    require valid-user
</Directory>

And I restarted Apache via launchctl:

sudo launchctl unload -w  /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist
sudo launchctl load -w  /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist

Voila! An OpenID consumer on my laptop.

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