Setting up a private beta for a website

Question

I'm trying to setup a "private beta" for a site that I'm working on. The site uses open id. I don't want anyone to even browse the pages if they aren't part of the beta. What's the best way to implement this? Any suggestions?

For example:

When the site goes live, users will go to http://www.mydomain.com which will not require them to log in.

For the beta I want to restrict access. Users that go to http://www.mydomain.com will be redirected to a login page. Anyone attempting to access ANY PART OF THE SITE who is not authenticated will be redirected back to the login page.

I could stick [Authorize] attributes all over my controller actions, but that seems stupid.

Answer 1

If you're using ASP.NET MVC, it comes with authentication/authorization out of the box. You should be able to use that to setup authentication on your site.

Alternatively you could setup app server settings - IIS lets you setup username/password on a specific site it's serving, regardless of what the actual application may do. If you have access to the app server this might be the best solution.

If you're using IIS6, you can setup authorization easily. Right-click on your site > Properties > Directory Security Tab > Authentication and Access Control > Edit, and enter a username/pwd of your choice. Done.

Answer 2

The real question is how are they being invited to the private beta?

You could setup a password which drops a cookie much like serverfault.com does.

OR

If you know who you are inviting: you could add them to the system before hand using the email/login information that you already know about them (assuming you are inviting them via email)

Answer 3

Best way are invitation system (based on invitation code) or manually confirmation access after create profile in your system. imho

Answer 4

Or you could host the site on a private server, and set up a VPN to use it. Depending on your resources and needs this may be the easiest and most secure way to do what you want without modifying your codebase.

OR alternatively you could use Apache or IIS to force authentication on access to the website directory. Keeping the authentication info in .htaccess for a while.

Answer 5

I have implemented a function in a web application a while ago where we go the possibility to block access to the full website unless the user was an administrator (which in our case meant that the user account was a member of a specific group in Active Directory).

It was based on two things. First, all pages in the web application inherited not directly from the Page class, but from a custom page class in our web application. Second, we had a value like this in the appSettings section of web.config file:

<add key="adminaccessonly" value="0" />

The custom page class would check that value when loading. If it was not 0 it would redirect to a page (that did not inherit the same custom page class, though) informing the user that "the site is not available right now". If the value was 0 the page would load as usual.

In that application we used this to be able to take the site "offline" when we deployed a new version, giving us some time to verify that all was good before we let in the users again.

Answer 6

Even though you use open id authentication, you may still need some form of authorization mechanism. The simplest form would be a user-roles system in your database that assigns different roles to users

In your case, just assign the private_beta role to your private beta invitees and ensure you your authorization mechanism that all users have private_beta privilege before they may continue.

If you don't want to provide authorization for the public site (where everyone can do everything, once authenticated), then, you may only need to do a quick-and-dirty post-processing (for private beta only) on your open_id authenticated users to check them off a short list (which you can store on a text file.