Integrating Flarum with existing web app

User15

Hello everyone.
I'm currently running a web app, made in Laravel 5.3.
What I'm looking to do is integrate Flarum with it.
More precisely, I want to have members logged into the forum when they log in into the web app, and the same for log out. Only members of the web app should have an account.

What I did until now is the following:
1. Installed Flarum into the same DB as my webapp with the flarum_ DB prefix.
2. Disabled registration in Flarum itself.
3. Ported all accounts from my users table to the flarum_users table.
4. Created a field in my webapp users table containing the ID of the flarum_users entry so I can later pull info from my webapp's user table.

So, all members can now log in to the forum using the same DB credentials.
What is left is to integrate the login,
My idea was to do something like this in my web app:

// code to login the user to the web app is here
Flarum::loginUserWithId($webAppUser->flarum_id);

How would I go about doing this? Is there a better way?

Thanks.
Regards!

luceos

Create a custom middleware that reads a cookie on the domain. That's, most likely, the easiest solution. If you then check whether the user exists (already) in Flarum you can do an API call underwater to sync the data to Flarum without doing that sync continuously.

User15

Thanks for such a swift reply. Appreciated.

I am not sure I am following, though. To be honest, I am looking into the Flarum code, and thing are not really clear to me on how they work etc. My application code is structured quite differently than what Flarum does.

Can you provide a bit more info, or even better some psuedo-code?

Thanks.

luceos

User15 alternatively you could use flagrow/passport in Flarum and laravel/passport in Laravel ? But that's not a seamless integration, it's SSO.

I'd have to sit down properly to give you some pointers, feel free to join flarum/developers on Gitter in the meantime ?

User15

Yep, going that route doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for.

I'll head over to Gitter.
Thanks again!
Edit: luceos I'm on there atm, so if you have a few minutes, let me know.

josiahking

@User15 How did it go with your integration. Am in the same shoe right now.

EyalKatz

Hi, I'm also wondering how easy it would be to implement basic SSO with my web apps. Was it done before? Does the API allow you to automatically login to Flarum when the same user is loggedin to another web site? I implemented many such integrations with other systems, so either simple api/cookie or full oauth2 would be great.

askvortsov

Flarum has robust support for external authentication providers, this is done via an extension, like:

It's possible that one of these (especially passport or saml) might solve your problem, but if not, it's fairly easy to create an authentication extension, I'd start by looking at some of the ones above for code ~~copy-paste~~ inspiration. Feel free to reach out if you have further questions!

clarkwinkelmann

DenisPIcard see the links posted by askvortsov above. If you can implement OAUTH, the Passport extension is the ideal solution.

DenisPIcard

Hello everyone,
We have hardly worked to develop an application using Symfony 4 (soon Symfony5), deployed today, to store the files (pdf and jpeg) for a competition for French A-level student. The teacher use authentication to connect and upload his files.
We wish now use a forum, and I look how I could integrate Flarum in our application.
Where can I hope to have explanations, and help ?
Thanks for your replies