Flarum + Laravel User Syncing?

MonteCarlo

I have an external Laravel app I want to sync with my Flarum forum. For example, if they login on the forum, they are automatically logged in and I can display their username, email, etc... (Also ideally want it so if the username changes on Flarum, it will also be reflected when they access the external pages as well.)

I've seen a few people recommend Passport, but it seems a bit overly complicated for my use-case and I'm really not a fan of the whole redirect and asking for approval part since I feel in my use-case it's more likely to just confuse my users and add more friction than necessary.

I thought about just defining a new connection with my flarum details, and configuring the User class in my external Laravel app using something like;

protected $connection = 'flarum';
protected $table = 'flarum.users';
public $timestamps = false;

This has the added benefit that I could easily add relationships in my external app to the user as well, and while I'm sure it'll work, it feels a bit hacky and I'm sure it will have some weird quirks.

I was wondering what my other options were in regards to achieving this or if there was an officially endorsed way to achieve this sort of functionality.

askvortsov

MonteCarlo Personally I'm very hesitant to have multiple services using the same database, but the alternative is an intermediate identity provider / service provider setup via OAuth or SAML, and you mentioned you'd prefer to avoid that.

I will note that synchronizing sessions between two unrelated services without using an established protocol can be a bit tricky and adds surface area for security vulnerabilities, but that seems to be the tradeoff.

There are also some custom solutions for authenticating between flarum and WordPress (a paid one and a free one), but I'm not sure whether that model fits your criteria. It'd need to be adapted to Laravel either way.

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/22229-premium-wordpress-integration
https://discuss.flarum.org/d/21666-php-and-wordpress-single-sign-on-sso-with-optional-jwt-addon

hrvoje_hr

Following this. Looking soon to run another Flarum on a separate database with a shared users table.

clarkwinkelmann

Having worked on the Wordpress integration extension, I can say this is quite tricky.

I have personally not used the other open-source Wordpress/SSO package but it might be your best starting point if you don't want to implement the authentication from scratch.

I don't recommend using a common database unless you absolutely know what you're doing. If Laravel edits your Flarum data via database instead of REST API, some important events won't trigger and extenders won't run, which might break the internal state of some extensions. It would also break extensions like my Audit Log which would be unable to tell how a value was edited in the database.

My Wordpress integration basically uses REST API endpoints for each app to tell about account changes between each other, and a system of cookies and signed URLs for login and logout.

I don't think it's easy to create a read-to-use package for Laravel as there are multiple ways to implement login/logout pages and endpoints in Laravel. It would end up being a similar package to the existing SSO package.

Passport/OAuth is very easy to implement in comparison, since it was made with Laravel in mind and the Passport package for Laravel is quite easy to setup.

I have implemented global logout for Passport-based login in Flarum in the past, as it was the only real downside of oauth-based login. Unfortunately the code is no longer compatible with the latest Flarum but it could provide some inspiration https://github.com/zetamode/flarum-ext-master-logout The other half of the code (Laravel side) is closed source but I could open-source the relevant parts it if there's interest. The project that used this code is no longer active.