Tank Auth v1.0 (CI authentication library)

[eluser]millo[/eluser]
Hey, Thought I would replace my redundant question with something useful. I have successfully installed Tank Auth on my Windows Xampp server and thought I would post a copy of my log here in case anyone comes up against the same problems that I encountered.

Hope this is of help to somebody! :-) ...

### 30th May 2009 18:30 - Install Tank Auth Authentication ###

Researched the available authentication packages available. Narrowed it down to about four (The Auth Library, DX Auth, Tank Auth (a reworked DX Auth?) and Redux). It got down to Redux and Tank Auth because they seemed to be more comprehensive with regards to it's features and they were both meant to be easy to install. Finally I decided on Tank Auth. I just seemed to like the responsiveness and enthusiasm of it's developer on the forums.

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/110993/
http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Tank_Auth/
http://konyukhov.com/soft/tank_auth/

Installing was easy enough.

1. Download the latest version of the library.
2. Unzip the package.
3. Copy the application folder content to your CI application folder.
4. Copy the captcha folder to your CI folder. Make sure this folder is writable by web server.
5. Install database schema into your MySQL database.
6. Open the application/config/config.php file in your CI installation and change $config['sess_use_database'] value to TRUE.

To add to point 5. I also had to set the database settings in config/database.php.

When I installed the Auth Library, the first thing I got was this error:

---

Code:

Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. If you entered the URL manually please check your spelling and try again.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 404
clienta.local
05/30/09 20:51:23
Apache/2.2.11 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8i PHP/5.2.9

---

I then thought that perhaps it had to do with the fact that I didn't have the .htaccess file in there so I got one out of an old project and put it in and it was fine.

It talks about the .htaccess settings here:
http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-gui.../urls.html

Here is a copy of what I put in my .htaccess file. I used this setting when working on a previous project. It's used to remove the index.php from the url and also so that I can reference files that are in folders like '/css' and '/img' much more easily. I think I'd gotten most of the settings below from a forum but not sure which one as it was a while ago for another project. You might have to look for it if it's necessary.

Code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$  index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

Some useful info on how to create overall file structure here:
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/57602/

After having installed the .htaccess file, the example forms provided by Tank Auth started rendering fine. However a few initial problems that I noted:

1. The font on the captcha image was too small.
2. When registering it tried to send off an email and running in XAMPP/Windows it seemed to be an issue.

I solved both of them via this forum thread:
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/110993/

- Solving Problem 1:

In system/application/config/tank_auth.php I made the following changes:

Code:

$config['captcha_fonts_path'] = 'captcha/fonts/3.ttf';

(this was using 5.ttf but font 3 seems clearer and characters more distinguishable)

Code:

$config['captcha_font_size'] = 18;

(this was set to 14 before, although it didn't increase much in size by setting it to 18 it did appear clearer)

- Solving Problem 2:

In the thread mentioned above there is a link to the following page that solved problem number 2.
http://i.justrealized.com/2008/05/02/how...-in-xampp/

These are what I changed the default settings in the following files:

C:\xampp\sendmail\sendmail.ini:

Code:

smtp_server=mail.myserver.net
[email protected]
auth_password=mypassword (make sure this works by testing your mail server to see that it accepts user and pass correctly)

C:\xampp\php\php.ini

Code:

SMTP = mail.myserver.net
sendmail_from = [email protected]
sendmail_path = "C:\xampp\sendmail\sendmail.exe -t"

Remember! This is running off my laptop, Windows system so normally there is no mail server running, but this all seems to work now! Activation emails are being sent to me, even though gmail is classifying them as spam. I would imagine that's something that I can configure when it goes live.

- Change to schema.sql file:
I also modified the schema.sql file, it had the COLLATE settings as COLLATE utf8_bin and I changed them to COLLATE utf8_general_ci as that is what my general database collation is set at so that seems the appropriate thing to do.

Hope that this is useful to somebody.

Thanks Gromozeka! Nice Work!

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