showoff

Password protecting a presentation

Showoff has two methods of password protection. Pages that are protected require a username and password to acces. This is typically used to prevent others from controlling your presentation. Pages that are locked, however, only require a viewing key.

You define the pages you want to protect with arrays in your showoff.json file. This configuration would require the viewing key of foobar to load and print the print-friendly version.

"locked": ["print"],
"key": "foobar",

You can mix and match exactly which functionality is available to your audience. For example, if you want to restrict access to the presenter, but allow anyone with the viewing key to use the print endpoint to generate a PDF file:

"protected": ["presenter"],
"locked": ["slides", "print"],

"key": "foobar",
"user": "superman",
"password": "kryptonite",

Serving via SSL

Now that you’ve password protected your presentation, you’ve also got the option of serving it via SSL for greater security. Enable it with:

"ssl": true,

This will autogenerate a self-signed certificate and enable HTTPS for your presentation. Note that some browsers will not allow the websocket connection used to enable Follow Mode with a self-signed certificate unless all viewers permanently accept the certificate.

If you’d rather not use self-signed certificates, you can provide your own with:

"ssl": true,
"ssl_certificate": "/path/to/some/certificate.pem",
"ssl_private_key": "/path/to/the/corresponding/private_key.pem",

Let’s Encrypt CA Certificates

If you are hosting your presentations on a public address that resolves properly, then you have the option of requesting those certificates from the Let’s Encrypt CA using something like the following:

$ certbot certonly --standalone -d preso.example.com

Your certificates will be saved into /etc/letsencrypt/live/$domain, so you can then point your showoff.json to those files.

"ssl": true,
"ssl_certificate": "/etc/letsencrypt/live/preso.example.com/cert.pem",
"ssl_private_key": "/etc/letsencrypt/live/preso.example.com/privkey.pem",

See the Certbot User Guide for more information on the tool.