How to replace an user's authentication 'http.formLogin()' with a form that is on another frontend server?

Question

Inside a class that extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter, I have this authencitation method. I store my users inside an Active Directory.

    @Override
    public void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) {
        ActiveDirectoryLdapAuthenticationProvider adProvider
                = new ActiveDirectoryLdapAuthenticationProvider("domain.com", "ldap", "ou, dc");
        adProvider.setConvertSubErrorCodesToExceptions(true);
        adProvider.setUseAuthenticationRequestCredentials(true);
        adProvider.setUserDetailsContextMapper(userDetailsContextMapper());
        auth.authenticationProvider(adProvider);
    }

I used to use a http.formLogin() for testing purpose. Whenever I call localhost:80/security I had to write my username and password in the form.

This method was perfect for testing my connexion to the AD.

But now, I have my frontend in a different server. So here is my question, where should I pass the username and the password to the authentication method ?

How can I hardcode the username and the password and authenicate to my Active Directory ? (for testing only now, after I'm going to use filters and controllers after).

I hope my question is clear.

Answer 1

You have mixed two different questions: How to create outer login page and How to integrate your application with ActiveDirectory.

For single-page applications, your API should send a 200 response along with the user data, or a 4xx response. This can be done by supplying your own handlers, like this (pseudocode just show the idea):

@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
http
    .formLogin()
        ...
        .successHandler(your authentication success handler object)
        .failureHandler(your authentication failure handler object)
        .and()
    .logout()
        ...
        .logoutSuccessHandler(your logout success handler object)
        .and()
    .exceptionHandling()
        .authenticationEntryPoint(new Http403ForbiddenEntryPoint())
    ...
}

For example, these are coded as below.

Authentication success handler:

@Component
public class AuthSuccessHandler extends SimpleUrlAuthenticationSuccessHandler {

    @Autowired    
    private ObjectMapper objectMapper;

    @Autowired    
    private MyService myService;

    @Override
    public void onAuthenticationSuccess(HttpServletRequest request, 
                    HttpServletResponse response, Authentication authentication)
    throws IOException, ServletException {

        response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_OK);
        response.setContentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE);

        AbstractUser currentUser = myService.userForClient();

        response.getOutputStream().print(
            objectMapper.writeValueAsString(currentUser));

        clearAuthenticationAttributes(request);
    }
}

In summary, it returns a response code 200 with the JSONified current user in the response data.

Authentication failure handler

In fact, there is no need to code a class for the authentication failure handler - the SimpleUrlAuthenticationFailureHandler provided by Spring, if instantiated without any arguments, works as desired.

Logout success handler

public class MyLogoutSuccessHandler implements LogoutSuccessHandler {

    @Override
    public void onLogoutSuccess(HttpServletRequest request,
        HttpServletResponse response, Authentication authentication)
        throws IOException, ServletException {

          response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_OK);
    }
}