This plugin allows you to use a basic OAuth2 provider as authentication for Discourse. It should work with many providers, with the caveat that they must provide a JSON endpoint for retriving information about the user you are logging in.
This is mainly useful for people who are using login providers that aren't very popular. If you want to use Google, Facebook or Twitter, those are included out of the box and you don't need this plugin. You can also look for other login providers in our Github Repo.
First, set up your Discourse application remotely on your OAuth2 provider. It will require a Redirect URI which should be:
http://DISCOURSE_HOST/auth/oauth2_basic/callback
Replace DISCOURSE_HOST
with the approriate value, and make sure you are
using https
if enabled. The OAuth2 provider should supply you with a
client ID and secret, as well as a couple of URLs.
Visit your Admin > Settings > Login and fill in the basic configuration for the OAuth2 provider:
-
oauth2_enabled
- check this off to enable the feature -
oauth2_client_id
- the client ID from your provider -
oauth2_client_secret
- the client secret from your provider -
oauth2_authorize_url
- your provider's authorization URL -
oauth2_token_url
- your provider's token URL.
If you can't figure out the values for the above settings, check the developer documentation from your provider or contact their customer support.
Discourse is now capable of receiving an authorization token from your OAuth2 provider. Unfortunately, Discourse requires more information to be able to complete the authentication.
We require an API endpoint that can be contacted to retrieve information about the user based on the token.
For example, the OAuth2 provider SoundCloud provides such a URL.
If you have an OAuth2 token for SoundCloud, you can make a GET request
to https://api.soundcloud.com/me?oauth_token=A_VALID_TOKEN
and
will get back a JSON object containing information on the user.
To configure this on Discourse, we need to set the value of the
oauth2_user_json_url
setting. In this case, we'll input the value of:
https://api.soundcloud.com/me?oauth_token=:token`
The part with :token
tells Discourse that it needs to replace that value
with the authorization token it received when the authentication completed.
Discourse will also add the Authorization: Bearer
HTTP header with the
token in case your API uses that instead.
There is one last step to complete. We need to tell Discourse what attributes are available in the JSON it received. Here's a sample response from SoundCloud:
{
"id": 3207,
"permalink": "jwagener",
"username": "Johannes Wagener",
"uri": "https://api.soundcloud.com/users/3207",
"permalink_url": "http://soundcloud.com/jwagener",
"avatar_url": "http://i1.sndcdn.com/avatars-000001552142-pbw8yd-large.jpg?142a848",
"country": "Germany",
"full_name": "Johannes Wagener",
"city": "Berlin"
}
The oauth2_json_user_id_path
, oauth2_json_username_path
, oauth2_json_name_path
and
oauth2_json_email_path
variables should be set to point to the appropriate attributes
in the JSON.
The only mandatory attribute is id - we need that so when the user logs on in the future that we can pull up the correct account. The others are great if available -- they will make the signup process faster for the user as they will be pre-populated in the form.
Here's how I configured the JSON path settings:
oauth2_json_user_id_path: 'id'
oauth2_json_username_path: 'permalink'
oauth2_json_name_path: 'full_name'
I used permalink
because it seems more similar to what Discourse expects for a username
than the username in their JSON. Notice I omitted the email path: SoundCloud do not
provide an email so the user will have to provide and verify this when they sign up
the first time on Discourse.
If the properties you want from your JSON object are nested, you can use periods. So for example if the API returned a different structure like this:
{
"user": {
"id": 1234,
"email": {
"address": "[email protected]"
}
}
}
You could use user.id
for the oauth2_json_user_id_path
and user.email.address
for oauth2_json_email_path
.
Good luck setting up custom OAuth2 on your Discourse!
MIT