Discord CAS

Tool for user verification via CAS on Discord server. If your organization uses CAS for authentication, and if you also run a Discord server whose private contents should only be accessible to CAS authenticated users, then this is the right tool for you.

Once a user are authenticated on any one server, they will not need to repeat the whole signup process on another server.

Contributions

Feel free to make a PR/issue for feature implementation/request.

Formating for python is done with Black with a 80 character limit. Formating for javascript isnt strict as long as 80 character limit is followed.

Privacy policy

When a user authenticates with our web portal, we store their following information:

1. Full Name
2. Email
3. Roll number
4. DiscordID.

1,2,3 are obtained from CAS, and 4 is obtained from Discord.

This data is used strictly for authentication only, and not visible publicly. It is only visible to the server host.

The bot does not track any interactions. If a user does not authenticate with our portal, we store no data.

License

MIT

Adding the bot

1. Make a pull request to the server by editing the server_config.ini file per your server requirements (see subsection below for more details)
2. Create a new role for the bot, which satisfies the criteria given in the next section.
3. After your PR is merged, navigate to the this URL to invite the bot and add it to your server. Note that you must have "Manage Server" permission on this server. (If you're new to Discord roles, read the FAQ: link)

Configuration parameters

The following configuration are possible through server_config.ini:

1. setrealname: set member nickname (post verification) equal to their real name (obtained from CAS).
2. grantroles: a comma-separated list of roles you'd like to assign to the member post-verification. If the roles do not exist in the server, they'll be created automatically.
3. serverid: ID of the Discord server. See Discord FAQ. (In Discord lingo, a server is known as a guild.)
4. deleteroles: a comma-separated list of roles you'd like to remove from the member post-verification. For example, if new users get the unverified role on joining your server, you can set deleteroles=unverified.

deleteroles, setrealname are optional. If you don't specify a value for them, it's picked up from the [DEFAULT] section at the top.

Example usage

[Chess Club]
serverid=724827932778037370
setrealname=yes
grantroles=Verified,IIIT

Regarding the bot role

You can create a new "Bot" role in your server and give it to our bot. This role should satisfy the following criteria:

1. The bot will only give the user role A if the bot's topmost role is above role A.
2. To change the nickname for a user, the user's highest role should be lower than the bot's highest role.
3. The bot should have write access to the channel to give feedback on verification (Success/Failure).

(If you're new to Discord roles, read the FAQ: link)

Notes

1. /verify might not work for server-admins. That indicates your role setup does not follow the criteria above.

If at any point you face any difficulty, please raise a new issue in this GitHub repository.

Current deployment status

The current instance of the bot used by IIIT-H clubs is hosted by:

Name	Time period	Server
Ankith Pai	March 19, 2024 -	https://osdg.iiit.ac.in
Shamil	2022 - early 2024	https://osdg.iiit.ac.in
Gaurang Tandon	late June 21 - 2022 ??	??
Vidit Jain	April 6, 21 - late June 21	??

This instance is intended to be used only by IIIT-H related discord servers. See the section below if you want to host the project for any other purpose.

Hosting the project

This project is made up of two parts, the web portal (in the /portal directory) and the discord bot (in the /bot directory)

You may need to change the source code corresponding to your organization's CAS attributes; specifically, the /cas express endpoint has settings for which attributes to fetch from the CAS server response.

Dependencies

We use docker and docker-compose.

For instance, on an Ubuntu 22.04 server one would install them with: sudo apt install docker.io docker-compose

Setting up MongoDB

For our deployed instance, we are using MongoDB Atlas. If you don't want to use a cloud service, you could set up a mongo server instance from docker-compose, that the portal and bot containers get access to.

Configuring secrets and parameters needed

Change the config parameters in .env.template and rename it to .env.

Running and stopping the project

A simple ./run.sh and ./stop.sh starts and stops the project respectively (these commands use docker-compose and take care of both ./portal and ./bot, in separate containers)

Configuring systemd unit

On a deployment server, it is useful to run above scripts in a systemd unit. Here is a sample:

[Unit]
Description=Runs CASBOT in /home/bots
After=docker.service
Requires=docker.service

[Service]
Environment="CASBOT_DIR=/home/bots/Discord-CAS"
Restart=always
ExecStartPre=/home/bots/Discord-CAS/stop.sh
ExecStart=/home/bots/Discord-CAS/run.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This file is stored in /etc/systemd/system/casbot.service, and assumes that the source code of the repo is in /home/bots/Discord-CAS.