Sputnik: Permissions

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<span class="teaser">
  You can configure Sputnik to limit who can read or edit pages.  You can also use Sputnik "behind the scenes" to manage a site that does not look like a wiki at all.
</span>

## Simply Locking It Down

Let's start with a simple answer to a common question of what to do if you want to stop random people from editing your Sputnik, or even knowing it's a wiki.  If you want to do something more complicated (or want to understand how this works), see the next section.

First, to block anonymous users from editing any pages (and even
seeing the "edit" link), edit @Root (as "Admin"), then go to "Permissions"
in "Advanced Options" and change

--deny(Anonymous, "edit")
    --deny(Anonymous, "save")

deny(Anonymous, "edit")
    deny(Anonymous, "save")

You can also add 'deny(Anonymous, "history")' if you want anonymous
users to not be able to see history (or see the history link).

Of course, you would also want to stop random visitors from registering.  To do this, go to "sputnik/register"
(click on the registration link) as Admin, click on "edit", go to
"Actions" in "Advanced Options" and change

show = "register.show_form"
    submit = "register.submit"

--show = "register.show_form"
    --submit = "register.submit"

This will disable registration or new users.

Finally, to remove the registration link form all pages, edit
"sputnik/translations" and change:

en_US = "<a $login_link>Login</a> or <a $register_link>register</a>",

en_US = "<a $login_link>Login</a>",

(Watch for that closing quote and the comma.)

## The Details

For those who care, let me explain how this works.

Sputnik has a permission system, which may be a little complicated for
this simple case, but on the other hand it is very flexible. So, you
can allow/deny anyone from doing anything you want, either on a case
by case basis or specifying groups of users, and you can do this for
specific nodes or all nodes.

The permissions are specified by a field called "permissions", which
contains Lua code that specifies permissions as a sequence of calls to
two functions: allow(who, what) and deny(who, what).  Both take two
parameters, which specify to whom the rule applies and what actions it
covers.  Each parameter can be a string value or a function that takes
a string and returns a decision.  For instance:

allow("yuri", "edit")  -- "yuri" can "edit" (i.e., see the edit form)
    allow("yuri", "save") -- "yuri" can "save"

The first parameter (who) can be a function that defines a class of
users (returning true for members and false for non-members).  E.g.:

allow(Admin, "edit") -- any admin can edit

The same for the second parameter (what):

deny(Anonymous, all_actions) -- deny anonymous users from doing anything.

The built in functions are: Admin, Authenticated, Anonymous,
all_users, and all_actions.  (The latter two always return true.)

The rules are applied in order, overridomg the previous ones for those
users and actions that they apply to.  For instance:

deny(all_users, "edit")
    allow(Admin, all_actions)
    deny("yuri", "edit)

has the effect of prohibiting all users from editing, except for
Admins (who can do anything they want), but with an extra stupulation
that "yuri" can't edit even if he is an admin.

Sputnik's nodes inherit field values from their "prototype" nodes.
Prototypes can be specified explicitly (the "Prototype" field) and
default to "@Root", which is every node's ultimate prototype.

In case of permissions, inheritance is done by simple concatenation of
rules, from the most distant ancestor to the current node.  This way
down-stream rules override upstream ones.

What this all means is that setting permissions in @Root changes
default permissions for all nodes, but specific nodes can add more
rules.

By default, we configure @Root (the default prototype for all nodes)
to allow most actions to anonymous users, and then define two
additional prototypes @Text\_Config and @Lua\_Config which block
non-Admin users from everything except for "show" and "history" (and
you can comment out those two for extra security).  All configuration
nodes (sputnik/config, etc.) then inherit from one of those two.  A
few nodes (e.g., sputnik/passwords) then additionally block users from
even seeing the content.

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