Limit access to a user, and specific functions

[Brian Dunbar]

New to cockpit - a co-worker mentioned it last week and it seems pretty nifty.  I'm curious if it's a good fit for a project of mine.

I want to host Open Bazaar servers (https://openbazaar.org/).  I'd _like_ to give my users access a GUI as 'a' user to run a limited set of functions such as ..

* start / stop a service
* look at a log file
* run a predefined set of API calls using CURL
* run a predefined script to backup a database

Is Cockpit a good fit?

~brian

[Stef Walter]

On 27.03.2016 03:49, [e-mail] wrote:
> New to cockpit - a co-worker mentioned it last week and it seems
> pretty nifty.  I'm curious if it's a good fit for a project of mine.
>
> I want to host Open Bazaar servers (https://openbazaar.org/).  I'd
> _like_ to give my users access a GUI as 'a' user to run a limited set
> of functions such as ..
> start / stop a service * look at a log file * run a predefined set
>
> of API calls using CURL * run a predefined script to backup a
> database

Cockpit provides login access to a system. So the user can perform the
various actions that they could if they logged into the system in a
terminal (for example).

So in total you would need to:

1. Make sure that the same user logged if in on the terminal
    can perform the same tasks. See below for a twist.

2. Build a Cockpit UI package to expose just those tasks.

http://stef.thewalter.net/creating-plugins-for-the-cockpit-user-interface.ht...
> Is Cockpit a good fit?

Not without work.

In theory if you do already have a REST API that encapsulates what you
want the user to do, and provides authentication for users, you can
probably do something similar to what the Cockpit Kubernetes container
does, and provide access just to that API:

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/tree/master/containers/kubernetes

But it's a bit complicated to make this work and requires lots of bits
to coordinate on what they expect to happen.

Stef

[Brian Dunbar]

Thanks.  Looks like a thing I'll look at in a year or two: get this sucker
off the ground first with a MVP.

Appreciate it.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 7:43 AM, Stef Walter  wrote:
> On 27.03.2016 03:49, [e-mail] wrote:
> > New to cockpit - a co-worker mentioned it last week and it seems
> > pretty nifty.  I'm curious if it's a good fit for a project of mine.
> >
> > I want to host Open Bazaar servers (https://openbazaar.org/).  I'd
> > _like_ to give my users access a GUI as 'a' user to run a limited set
> > of functions such as ..
> > start / stop a service * look at a log file * run a predefined set
> >
> > of API calls using CURL * run a predefined script to backup a
> > database
>
> Cockpit provides login access to a system. So the user can perform the
> various actions that they could if they logged into the system in a
> terminal (for example).
>
> So in total you would need to:
>
> Make sure that the same user logged if in on the terminal
> can perform the same tasks. See below for a twist.
>
> Build a Cockpit UI package to expose just those tasks.
>
> http://stef.thewalter.net/creating-plugins-for-the-cockpit-user-interface.ht...
> > Is Cockpit a good fit?
>
> Not without work.
>
> In theory if you do already have a REST API that encapsulates what you
> want the user to do, and provides authentication for users, you can
> probably do something similar to what the Cockpit Kubernetes container
> does, and provide access just to that API:
>
> https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/tree/master/containers/kubernetes
>
> But it's a bit complicated to make this work and requires lots of bits
> to coordinate on what they expect to happen.
>
> Stef
>
> cockpit-devel mailing list
> [e-mail]
>
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