README

Plexity (Password Complexity) is a password complexity library that enables you to set "rules" for a password (or any other kind of string) that you can then check against in your application.

This library supports the following kind of complexity settings:

• Upper/lowercase character detection
• Number containment
• Special character containment
• Minimum/maximum character detection
• Password age expiry detection
• Detection of previous use such as against a password history datastore.
• Ability to add and check against a configurable list of common passwords/words etc.

Requirements

This library is developed and tested against PHP 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2!

If you need to use an older version of PHP, you should instead install the 1.x version of this library (see below for details).

License

This client library is released under the MIT license, a copy of the license is provided in this package.

Setup

To install the package into your project (assuming you are using the Composer package manager) you can simply execute the following command from your terminal in the root of your project folder:

composer require ballen/plexity

If you need to use an older version of PHP, version 1.x.x supports PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2, you can install this version using Composer with this command instead:

composer require ballen/plexity ^1.0

Examples

A simple example of how you can use the methods to build up a password complexity rule-set and then validate the password.

use Ballen\Plexity\Plexity as PasswordValidator;

$password = new PasswordValidator();

$password->requireSpecialCharacters() // We want the password to contain (atleast 1) special characters.
    //->requireSpecialCharacters(5), // We could also specify a specific number of special characters.
    ->requireUpperCase() // Requires the password to contains more than one upper case characters.
    ->requireLowerCase(2) // Requires the password to contains atleast 2 lower case characters.
    ->requireNumericChataters(3); // We want to ensure that the password uses at least 3 numbers!

// An example of passing a password history array, if the password exists in here then we'll disallow it!
$password->notIn([
    'test_password',
    'Ros3bud',
    'mypasSwordh88e8*&|re',
]);
// You can optionally pass in an implementation of PasswordHistoryInterface like so:
//$password->notIn(new CustomPasswordHistoryDatastore()); // Must implement Ballen\Plexity\Interfaces\PasswordHistoryInterface

try {
    $password->check('my_password_string_here');
    echo "Great news! The password passed validation!";
} catch (Ballen\Plexity\Exceptions\ValidationException $exception) {
    die('Password was invalid, the error was: ' . $exception->getMessage());
}

Tests and coverage

This library is fully unit tested using PHPUnit.

I use GitHub Actions for continuous integration, which triggers tests for PHP 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2 every time a commit is pushed.

If you wish to run the tests yourself you should run the following:

# Install the Plexity Library with the 'development' packages this then includes PHPUnit!
composer install

# Now we run the unit tests (from the root of the project) like so:
./vendor/bin/phpunit

Code coverage can also be run but requires XDebug installed...

./vendor/bin/phpunit --coverage-html ./report

Support

I am happy to provide support via. my personal email address, so if you need a hand drop me an email at: ballen@bobbyallen.me.