The big change here is to support an extremely limited form of HTTP basic
auth, for those situations when you've got some subset of requests coming in
which still need to be authenticated, but which aren't able to authenticate
via Discourse SSO. The intended use case is for webhooks and other
progammatic access methods. It is not intended to be a fully-featured HTTP
auth method (it only supports a single hard-coded user/password pair), but
instead an extremely simplistic "escape hatch".
If you need more complicated HTTP authentication, you probably want to
install nginx and do some crazy proxy chain games. Best of luck to you with
that.
To avoid getting in the way of the SSO flow, the HTTP authentication is done
"blind"; that is, a `WWW-Authenticate` is never sent in a response. This
may get up the nose of some user agents, however I can't see an easy way
around this.
Allowing the username header to be changed to something other than
Discourse-User-Name is a smaller change, needed to support third-party
software which looks for the authenticated username in a different header,
and which can't be overridden without a hammer and chisel.
Rafael dos Santos Silva
Matt Palmer
Sam
AJ Bowen
Guo Xiang Tan
Kane York