Solving A Chicken/Egg DI problem in Play Framework - Part 1

Still loving the Play Framework - I get more productive with it every day, and I'm lucky enough to be using it in my day job, income-generating side projects and fun experiments. Really helps in becoming familiar with every corner of the ecosystem.

One of those ecosystem libraries I've been using a bit is the Pac4j Play integration, which builds on the strong foundation of the Pac4j security library to give a comprehensive authentication/authorization platform on top of Play. It's extremely configurable and extensible, supports all the "modern" ways of logging in (e.g. OAuth2 via social providers) and is reasonably well-documented to boot.

One challenge I came across reared its ugly head when I migrated a Play-Pac4j-based app from Play 2.4 to 2.5. Here's a snippet from my MyAuthn - an implementation of Pac4j's Authenticator interface that performs the validation of credentials that come in from a login form (I've actually featured an earlier version of this class before - it's not really the greatest part of Pac4j):

class MyAuthn extends Authenticator[UsernamePasswordCredentials] {

  ...
  lazy val userService:UserService = 
    current.injector.instanceOf[UserService]

  def validate(creds: UsernamePasswordCredentials,
               ctx: WebContext):Unit = {

    ...
    userService.findByUsername(creds.getUsername).map { maybeUser =>
      ...
    }
  }
}

Ignoring the (above-documented) nastiness of the Unit-returning method, we see that we use a userService that is obtained by asking the current application's injector for a UserService instance.

This works because Play has had dependency injection (via Google Guice) since 2.4. It's obviously not the ideal way to do the injection (constructor injection is far neater in my opinion) but it's needed here because of the way we have to wire up Pac4j in a Module that gets run early on in the application boot sequence:

class SecurityModule (environment: Environment, 
                      config: Configuration) extends AbstractModule {

  override def configure(): Unit = {
    val baseUrl = config.getString("baseUrl").get

    val formClient = new FormClient(baseUrl + "/login", new MyAuthn())

    ...
  }
}

Notice how that at this point, we need to create a MyAuthn but in a Module there's no DI "context" (to use a Spring term) to inject the UserService it needs. Hence the unorthodox use of current.injector and the extremely iffy use of the lazy val to defer access until it's actually needed - the whole thing would fall in a heap if we couldn't defer access like that.

So that works, but in Play 2.5, statically accessing the current running application using the current handle is deprecated. And I hate deprecation warnings - they tell me I'm not using the framework the way the designers (who are far smarter than I) have determined is optimal. And thus I have a problem.

Read Part 2 of this post for the solution!