Using MySQL database for authentication in Ja-sig CAS

Question

I'm trying to hook my Ja-sig CAS server (v3.5 running on Tomcat7) up to a MySQL database for user authentication. I basically have a table 'users' in the database storing username/password pairs that I want CAS to check against. However, I'm having difficulty even getting my current configuration to deploy.

This is an excerpt from pom.xml as it relates to database connectivity:

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.jasig.cas</groupId>
   <artifactId>cas-server-support-jdbc</artifactId>
   <version>${cas.version}</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
   <groupId>commons-dbcp</groupId>
   <artifactId>commons-dbcp</artifactId>
   <version>1.4</version>
   <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

<dependency>
   <groupId>mysql</groupId>
   <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
   <version>5.1.22-bin</version>
   <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

And here is where I try to setup the database connection in WEB-INF/deployerConfigContext.xml:

<bean
class="org.jasig.cas.adaptors.jdbc.SearchModeSearchDatabaseAuthenticationHandler">
   <property name="tableUsers">
       <value>users</value>
   </property>
   <property name="fieldUser">
       <value>username</value>
   </property>
   <property name="fieldPassword">
       <value>password</value>
   </property>
   <property name="passwordEncoder">
       <bean
             class="org.jasig.cas.authentication.handler.DefaultPasswordEncoder">
        <constructor-arg value="MD5" />
       </bean>
   </property>
   <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
</bean>

<bean id="datasource"
      class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource">
    <property name="driverClassName">
        <value>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</value>
    </property>
    <property name="url">
        <value>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/cas_db</value>
    </property>
    <property name="username">
        <value>cas_server</value>
    </property>
    <property name="password">
        <value>pass</value>
    </property>
</bean>

It builds perfectly fine with Maven, but when I try to deploy it with Tomcat it doesn't work. I haven't been able to find anything particularly informative in any of the tomcat logs. I'm wondering if there might be a problem with 'commons-dbcp', since when I comment that out and use a simple authentication handler in deployerConfigContext.xml, I'm able to deploy.

There seems to be little/poor documentation of this from my current web research. If anyone has any good resources they could recommend as well, it would be greatly appreciated.

What do you mean by "it doesn't work?" Does Tomcat start? Do you get any unusual messages in the Tomcat logs? Do you have all the necessary jar files installed, such as the commons-dbcp and MySQL client jars? — Brian Showalter, Oct 05 '12 at 17:52
@BrianShowalter My apologies, I should have been more specific. Tomcat was starting just fine, but the CAS application failed to deploy. I was short of leads because it turned out I was looking in the wrong tomcat log (catalina instead of localhost). There I found a more detailed trace of why it failed to deploy, which ultimately led to my answer, which I've written more detailed below. — The Doge Prince, Oct 09 '12 at 16:23

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 08 '14 at 15:04

I finally found a trace of errors in the tomcat log localhost.YYYY-MM-DD.log. As it turns out, I needed to add commons-pool:

<dependency>
   <groupId>commons-pool</groupId>
   <artifactId>commons-pool</artifactId>
   <version>1.6</version>
   <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

which commons-dbcp is dependent upon. Installing this with Maven did away with the missing class exception I was getting.

My next problem was that I had mistakenly defined my datasource bean in the list of authenticationHandlers in deployerConfigContext.xml, which led to a type conversion exception. Moving the bean out of the list tag did the trick.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 15 '15 at 11:01

On one of the official guides for CAS + JDBC Authentication (https://wiki.jasig.org/display/CASUM/Using+JDBC+for+Authentication), they comment on that:

Note: It is recommended commons-dbcp 1.2.1 is used with MySQL instead of the newer version. I found that new version (1.2.2) will cause a Socket write error in MySQL, after your CAS is idle for more that 8 hours, which is the time that MySQL will clean up all idle connections.

Your problem might be related to the version of the commons-dbcp. In my case, I have a configuration similar to yours with the difference on the commons-dbcp version, I'm using 1.4 (no problems)

Using MySQL database for authentication in Ja-sig CAS

2 Answers2