relme-auth

For the past month or so I’ve been working on a small service that provides RelMeAuth. The code is on GitHub if you want to check it out, and I’ve got the service hosted on https://auth.hawx.me.

At the moment it supports the authentication methods that are of use to me (because I wanted to be able to check they actually work…), so there is GitHub, Twitter, Flickr and PGP for those people who want to be totally off the stacks.

authenticating with auth.hawx.me

When I first saw RelMeAuth (the idea), and an implementation at https://indieauth.com, it was quite confusing. There was a constant mention of something called IndieAuth leading to me thinking they were the same thing. It took writing this service to figure it out.

RelMeAuth is the process of taking a “profile URL” and authenticating by finding links marked up with rel=me, a server side implementation concern. This is what relme-auth (my implementation) does.

IndieAuth is the process of taking a “profile URL” and finding a rel=authorization_endpoint link, then authenticating with that. That is something a client should be concerned with doing. But, my confusion was that https://indieauth.com also handled this as a way to authenticate and so it all got a bit inceptionesque in my mind.

Anyway, give https://auth.hawx.me a go if you trust me enough. To use it as your IndieAuth provider add the following to your homepage’s <head>.

<link rel="authorization_endpoint" href="https://auth.hawx.me/auth">
<link rel="token_endpoint" href="https://auth.hawx.me/token">