How To Park The Bus In Your Drupal App

photo: sportskeeda

Yeah, don’t mind the title, it’s a popular term “park the bus” used by an ex Chelsea manager joe morinho . It’s a tactical football strategy to strengthen the line of defense after scoring a goal.

Now back to Drupal; there are lot of ways developer can secure Drupal password and I found policy password module interesting, so I decided to drush dl and configure it.

What we wanted to achieve

We wanted to prevent our team from entering dummy password into the system.

We wanted to have a combination of the following in our password

1 alphanumeric character (@)

At least 3 uppercase letter (A,S,D)

At least 2 numeric characters (2,4)

1 punctuation (.)

Crazy right? A combination could be JOE@24. Before I saw password policy module, I was thinking of developing Drupal module like this npm package, by Eugene Mutai where it gets the list of all frequently used password.

Password policy module came in handy and we didn’t waste time writing custom module for our intranet.

How to USE it

1. Download and install the module, just like other module

2. Go to admin module to enable it, if you are using DRUSH (drupal shell) simply type drush en password_policy — y, it will download, install and enable the package.

3. Go to admin/modules

Don’t forget what we are trying to achieve, 1 alphanumeric character, 3 uppercase characters, 2 Digits and 1 punctuation.

4. Go to admin/config/people/password_policy/add

Go to the constraint tab and add the following details to configure your password policy

5. Hit save and test your password policy, although this module is not fully ready in drupal 8, maintainers still working on it, but drupal 7 has a stable version.

My password policy (2 digits, 1 alphanumeric, 1 punctuation and 3 uppercase letters)

The beauty of the module is that, it hook into Drupal password quality indicator.

It indicate the level based on the your settings

There are lots of additional features you can use to park the bus in your Drupal app

Note: I wont recommend you using it on a public site, because users are bad in remembering password, if you really want to use it, you can use some constraints which is ideal. We used it on our intranet and most of our users are developers and tech expert, and our number 1 priority was security

Go ahead and explore

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