Using superagent to authenticate a user-agent in node.js, plus a bonus bug!

Summary

This post describes how I use the superagent library to test access to restricted resources on my web server. This is something that I found to take a bit more effort than I expected, so I thought I’d write this up for the greater good.

Context

I am running a website in which some resources are open to the internet, while others require authentication versus our CAS server.

I have been logging into the CAS server using request. But in the interest of trying out different libraries and all that, I decided to rewrite my
method using superagent.

I need to log into the CAS server from node.js because I am writing tests that verify that the protected resources are hidden to non-authenticated users, and available to authenticated ones.

Development server logs during development

In a prior post trumpeting my modest success with getting geojson tiles to work, I typed in my server address, but didn’t make it a link. That way robots wouldn’t automatically follow the link and my development server wouldn’t get indexed by Google indirectly.

What is interesting to me is that I still get the occasional hit from that posting. And this is with the server bouncing up and down almost continuously as I add functionality. Just now I was refactoring the tile caching service I wrote, and in between server restarts, someone hit my demo app.

And the GeoJSON tiler is coming along. In making the caching part more robust, I added a recursive directory creation hack which I explain below.

R. Struggle with it and it becomes clear.

Been using R almost exclusively for the past few weeks. I’ve always liked R, but I find that the syntax and style maddeningly slow to ingest. Perhaps everybody is like this, but I’ve found that some programming language idioms I take to pretty readily (JavaScript and Perl), some I hate (Java before generics and Spring IOC was odious, after it is at least tolerable), and others I just have to fight through a few weeks of doing things utterly wrong.

R falls in that last camp, but since I used to be pretty good at it back when I was working on my dissertation, I’ve always considered it to be my goto stats language. So now that I have a major deliverable due, and it really needs more advanced statistics than the usual “mean/max/min/sd” one can usually throw at data, I’ve taken the plunge back into R syntax once again.

I’m building up scripts to process massive amounts of data (massive to me, perhaps not to Google and Yahoo, but a terabyte is still a terabyte), so each step of these scripts has to be fast. So periodically I come across some step that is just too slow, or something that used to be fast but that slows down as I add more cruft and throw more data at it, it bogs down.

Here is an example of how R continues to confound me even after 3 weeks of R R R (I’m a pirate, watch me R).

Way too much cool stuff going on

So I finally spent an hour playing with node.js.

Better post on MooseX::Declare method signatures

So here is a better description of my problem, with simplified code examples.

First, the Holiday date checker that works (yes I know there is DateTime event classes and all that and I should use that framework, but I just wanted something that worked right away).

I used perl today, and I can’t figure out how to get my paper man icon.

I used perl today. Moose. I ran into a problem. It was annoying. I am way too stressed and tired to blog more. But I will anyway, secure in the knowledge that no one reads this blog but google’s spiders.

Okay anyway I used MooseX::Declare, and couldn’t get the method signature stuff to work. I did something like

method weekend_or_vacation (DateTime $dt){
  # check if weekend or vacation
  # with vacation being the tricky bit
  if($vacation || $weekend){
   return 1;
  }else{
    return 0;
  }
}

But MooseX::Declare kept complaining that it didn’t know what DateTime was. I scanned the tests in t and sure enough, they all test simple things like Str and ArrayRef and so on, but none of the more magical parts of type checking.

I eventually solved it the old fashioned way by puking if the argument wasn’t a DateTime, but I’d rather do it the method signature way.

A Flash-related browser crash ate my bug report to MooseX::Declare

ggghhhhaaaa. I hate flash. I really like http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/, or rather, I used to love it, but now they’ve switched to Flash and it is hateful hateful hateful. But I still can’t stop using it because the information is so awesome and handy and because UCI has an account and it is right there waiting for me whenever I have a question. But then *bang* one page too many and firefox just blinks off my desktop.

Tedious but necessary

I’ve found that I prefer making things to maintaining things. My wife will testify that tidying up is not my forte, but that I don’t mind the most laborious cooking task.

Using psql copy from DBIx::Class

I am loading up lots and lots of data, and need to track what is going on, but I really don’t need all of the stuff that DBIx::Class brings with it.  So I got a clue today and decided I was just going to use copy directly, picking off the file, gunzip-ping it, and using system to execute a psql copy call.

But, when I went to edit my code, I realized that I forgot about stuff like passwords and ports and hosts and all that junk that is nice to have in a portable perl script.

CPAN docs to the rescue! 

Washed out gray is the new black

I was working on Sakai help yesterday and decided that using CouchDB might be the way to go if I ever got some time to try to replace Sakai’s default help system.