Authentication component

Most oftenly, your server needs a way to identify the user making the current request. The authentication component provides a means for representing the user making the request and for authenticating this user against a DB or other datasource.

• the CurrentUserInterface allows the server to identify the user making the current request.
• the AuthenticatorInterface allows the server to authenticate the user with provided credentials.

Usage

In order to authenticate a user, you will first need to create a CurrentUser object.

$user = new Gobline\Auth\CurrentUser();

Once we have a user, we can authenticate the latter using an adapter implementing AuthenticatorInterface. One implementation is already provided, authenticating the user against a database: DbAuthenticator.

Firstly, we will have to set up the adapter. The DbAuthenticator requires a PDO instance and an instance of TableMetadata wrapping some metadata about the DB table we are authenticating against.

use Gobline\Auth\Authenticator\Db\TableMetadata;
use Gobline\Auth\Authenticator\Db\DbAuthenticator;

$authenticator = new DbAuthenticator($pdo, new TableMetadata('users'));

By default, TableMetadata assumes that

• the column id contains the id of the user
• the column email contains the login of the user
• the column password contains the password of the user
• the password encryption is bcrypt (possible values are: bcrypt, md5, sha1 or clear)

Customize these metadata for your database.

use Gobline\Auth\Authenticator\Db\TableMetadata;
use Gobline\Auth\Authenticator\Db\DbAuthenticator;

$metadata = new TableMetadata('users');
$metadata
    ->setColumnId('user_id')
    ->setColumnLogin('user_email')
    ->setColumnRole('user_type')
    ->setColumnPassword('user_password')
    ->setPasswordEncryption('md5');

$authenticator = new DbAuthenticator($pdo, $metadata);

You will also notice that besides the id, login and password, it is possible to specify a column containing the role (or group, type) of the user. This is especially useful when combining the authentication component with an ACL component (which is usually the case).

Now that we have set up our adapter, it's time to authenticate the user.

$authenticator->setIdentity('[email protected]');
$authenticator->setCredential('123456');

$user->isAuthenticated(); // returns false

if ($authenticator->authenticate($user)) {
	echo $user->getId(); // prints the user id from DB

	$user->isAuthenticated(); // returns true
}

The authenticator sets the id and the login of the user. It can additionally add the user's role (for ACL) and other column data.

An authenticated user is a user whose id is not null.

Persist the user's data among requests

While the above works perfectly for the first request, the user's data will be lost on subsequent requests. One way to achieve persistence is to store the user data in session. Gobline\Auth\Persistence\CurrentUser acts like a decorator over Gobline\Auth\CurrentUser (or any Gobline\Auth\CurrentUserInterface implementation), allowing to persist the data in session.

$user = new Gobline\Auth\CurrentUser();
$user = new Gobline\Auth\Persistence\CurrentUser($user);

Installation

You can install Gobline Auth using the dependency management tool Composer. Run the require command to resolve and download the dependencies:

composer require gobline/auth