rstudio server hack the login

Posted on November 9, 2022 • 1 minutes • 122 words • Suggest Changes

One of the features lacking from the open-source version of rstudio-server is the possibilty to edit the html pages (eg. to make a custom login page). It’s highly annoying one can’t give atleast some help reference on the login page, so I found a way to “hack” my own webserver by leveraging nginx’s sub_filter

You can simply replace the body with something like this :

# replace the login page only
location /auth-sign-in 
{
    sub_filter '<body>' '<body> some fancy help message !';
    sub_filter_once on;
    proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding ""; # only required if gzip compression is on
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
}

Using this method one could easily inject javascript or replace the entire page with a custom page.

info :

https://support--rstudio-com.netlify.app/products/rstudio/#rstudio-server
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19700871/how-to-inject-custom-content-via-nginx

img by claybanks