Authenticate meteor users from an external application

Question

I have a meteor application (with meteor Accounts), and am building a mobile application. How do I authenticate users from the mobile app. I have a python webservice that can send data to mobile clients. But I have no clue how to authenticate from the external app.

I did look at DDP client, but there is no 'authenticate method'. Is there any way to do this with a pure python solution? I have access to the 'users' collection -> srp verifier and salt.

Note: Python srp didn't work. The salt and verifier generated by python srp are supposedly bytes. However I can't even decode them using bytes.decode(encoding)

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to use the out-of-box account management baked into Meteor, then surface a mechanism that your PHP code can call to show different information based on who is authenticated.

If that's correct, I think your best bet is:

Build a PHP DDP Client. Meteor isn't really built to expose webservices in a traditional sense, but rather surface what they call a DDP protocol for external sources to plug into the server-side publications. That said, I have not yet found a PHP DDP client, but here is one in node, and one in .NET. You'll want to build a PHP DDP client and then write a Meteor.method in the Meteor server code that you can remotely call from your DDP client to check for a user's authentication.

BUT, if all you're doing is surfacing marketing information in your PHP site, perhaps it makes more sense to either (1) keep the entire app in PHP and use a native PHP account management system, or (2) save yourself the trouble of the DDP overhead and write the exposed marketing page directly in the Meteor app? If you need to keep it from a different server, consider a simple iframe?