How to create Laravel 5.1 Custom Authentication driver?

Question

I am working in Laravel authentication login using socialite. Now I can able to save data of user from socialite. But now I am facing problem how to authenticate user from gmail, github.

After some research I understood that I need to create custom authentication. I googled but all are Laravel 4.1 topics. If any one work on this please provide your answers.

I already read following topics but I didn't got how to do it?

http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/authentication#social-authentication

http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/providers

http://laravel-recipes.com/recipes/115/using-your-own-authentication-driver

http://laravel.io/forum/11-04-2014-laravel-5-how-do-i-create-a-custom-auth-in-laravel-5

Update

public function handleProviderCallback() {
    $user = Socialite::with('github')->user();
    $email=$user->email;
    $user_id=$user->id;

    //$authUser = User::where('user_id',$user_id)->where('email', $email)->first();
    $authUser = $this->findOrCreateUser($user);

    if(Auth::login($authUser, true)) {
        return Redirect::to('user/UserDashboard');
    }   
}

private function findOrCreateUser($user) {
    if ($authUser = User::where('user_id',$user->id)->first()) {
        return $authUser;
    }

    return User::create([
        'user_id' => $user->id,
        'name' => $user->nickname,
        'email' => $user->email,
        'avatar' => $user->avatar
    ]);
}

Answer 1

This answer is most suited for Laravel 5.1. Please take care if you are in some other version. Also keep in mind that IMHO this is a rather advanced level in Laravel, and hence if you don't fully understand what you are doing, you may end up crashing your application. The solution is not end to end correct. This is just a general guideline of what you need to do in order for this to work.

Adding Custom Authentication Drivers In Laravel 5.1

Hint: Laravel documentation for this topic is here.

Hint2: The last link you mentioned is quite useful in my opinion. I learned all of this after reading that link.

http://laravel.io/forum/11-04-2014-laravel-5-how-do-i-create-a-custom-auth-in-laravel-5

---

Before we start, I would first like to describe the login flow which will help you understand the process. Laravel uses a driver to connect to the database to fetch your records. Two drivers come pre-bundled with laravel - eloquent & database. We want to create a third so that we can customize it to our needs.

Illuminate\Auth\Guard inside your vendor folder is the main file which has code for the user to log in and log out. And this file mainly uses two Contracts (or interfaces) that we need to override in order for our driver to work. From Laravel's own documentation read this:

The Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\UserProvider implementations are only responsible for fetching a Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable implementation out of a persistent storage system, such as MySQL, Riak, etc. These two interfaces allow the Laravel authentication mechanisms to continue functioning regardless of how the user data is stored or what type of class is used to represent it.

So the idea is that for our driver to work we need to implement Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\UserProvider and Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable and tell Laravel to use these implementations instead of the defaults.

---

So let's begin.

Step 1: Choose a name for your driver. I name mine socialite. Then in your config/auth.php, change the driver name to socialite. By doing this we just told laravel to use this driver for authentication instead of eloquent which is default.

Step 2: In your app/Provider/AuthServiceProvider in the boot() method add the following lines:

Auth::extend('socialite', function($app) {
    $provider = new SocialiteUserProvider();
    return new AuthService($provider, App::make('session.store'));
});

What we did here is:

• We first used Auth facade to define the socialite driver.
• SocialiteUserProvider is an implementation of UserProvider.
• AuthService is my extension of Guard class. The second parameter this class's constructor takes is the session which laravel uses to get and set sessions.
• So we basically told Laravel to use our own implementation of Guard class instead of the default one.

Step 3: Create SocialiteUserProvider. If you read the Laravel's documentation, you will understand what each of these methods should return. I have created the first method as a sample. As you can see, I use my UserService class to fetch results. You can fetch your own results however you want to fetch them. Then I created an User object out of it. This User class implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable contract.

<?php
namespace App\Extensions;

use App\User;
use App\Services\UserService;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\UserProvider;

class SocialiteUserProvider implements UserProvider
{
    private $userService;

    public function __construct(UserService $userService)
    {
        $this->userService = $userService;
    }

    public function retrieveById($identifier)
    {
        $result = $this->userService->getUserByEmail($identifier);
        if(count($result) === 0)
        {
            $user = null;
        }
        else
        {
            $user = new User($result[0]);
        }

        return $user;
    }

    public function retrieveByToken($identifier, $token)
    {
        // Implement your own.
    }

    public function updateRememberToken(Authenticatable $user, $token)
    {
        // Implement your own.
    }

    public function retrieveByCredentials(array $credentials)
    {
        // Implement your own.
    }

    public function validateCredentials(Authenticatable $user, array $credentials)
    {
        // Implement your own.
    }
}

Step 4: Create User class which implements the Authenticatable. This class has to implement this interface because the Guard class will use this class to get values.

<?php
namespace App;

use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable;

class User implements Authenticatable
{
    protected $primaryKey = 'userEmail';
    protected $attributes = [];

    public function __construct(array $attributes)
    {
        $this->attributes = $attributes;
    }

    public function getUserAttributes()
    {
        return $this->attributes;
    }

    public function getAuthIdentifier()
    {
        return $this->attributes[$this->primaryKey];
    }

    public function getAuthPassword()
    {
        // Implement your own.
    }

    public function getRememberToken()
    {
        // Implement your own.
    }

    public function setRememberToken($value)
    {
        // Implement your own.
    }

    public function getRememberTokenName()
    {
        // Implement your own.
    }
}

Step 5: Finally create the AuthService class that will call the Guard methods. This is my own implementation. You can write your own as per your needs. What we have done here is extended the Guard class to implement two new functions which are self explanatory.

<?php
namespace App\Services;

use Illuminate\Auth\Guard;

class AuthService extends Guard
{
    public function signin($email)
    {
        $credentials = array('email' => $email);
        $this->fireAttemptEvent($credentials, false, true);
        $this->lastAttempted = $user = $this->provider->retrieveById($email);

        if($user !== null)
        {
            $this->login($user, false);
            return true;
        }
        else
        {
            return false;
        }
    }

    public function signout()
    {
        $this->clearUserDataFromStorage();

        if(isset($this->events))
        {
            $this->events->fire('auth.logout', [$this->user()]);
        }

        $this->user = null;
        $this->loggedOut = true;
    }
}

Step 6: Bonus Step Just to complete my answer, I will also explain the structure that UserService class expects. First lets understand what this class does. In our above steps we created everything to let laravel know how to use our authentication driver, instead of theirs. But we still haven't told laravel that how should it get the data. All we told laravel that if you call the userService->getUserByEmail($email) method, you will get your data. So now we simply have to implement this function.

E.g.1 You are using Eloquent.

public function getUserByEmail($email)
{
    return UserModel::where('email', $email)->get();
}

E.g.2 You are using Fluent.

public function getUserByEmail($email)
{
    return DB::table('myusertable')->where('email', '=', $email)->get();
}

Update: 19 Jun 2016

Thank you @skittles for pointing out that I have not clearly shown where the files should be placed. All the files are to be placed as per the namespace given. E.g. if the namespace is App\Extensions and the class name is SocialiteUserProvider then location of file is App\Extensions\SocialiteUserProvider.php. The App directory in laravel is the app folder.