How to programmatically log in into phpBB forum?

Question

I have a forum using phpBB. Now i would like to do something like this from source code:

login("user", "password")

How to do this in phpBB?

Answer 1

First you need to bootstrap for phpBB:

define('IN_PHPBB', true);
$phpbb_root_path = (defined('PHPBB_ROOT_PATH')) ? PHPBB_ROOT_PATH : './phpBB/';
$phpEx = substr(strrchr(__FILE__, '.'), 1);
include($phpbb_root_path . 'common.' . $phpEx);

$user->session_begin();

You'll have to replace the ./phpBB/ part with the relative path to the forum.

To make the user logged in, you have to do:

$result = $user->session_create($user_id, $admin, $autologin, $viewonline);

$admin should probably be false, $autologin and $viewonline depend on what you want.

NOTE: Calling session_create will set the session cookie for the user, so make sure you only call that when the current request is actually serving that user.

Answer 2

You will need a script that integrates with the phpBB framework. Something like this should work.

<?php
define('IN_PHPBB', true);
$phpbb_root_path = (defined('PHPBB_ROOT_PATH')) ? PHPBB_ROOT_PATH : './';
$phpEx = substr(strrchr(__FILE__, '.'), 1);
include($phpbb_root_path . 'common.' . $phpEx);

// Start session management
$user->session_begin();
$auth->acl($user->data);
$user->setup();
?>

Then, look at the $auth->login() function (an example use is in the login_box() function in /includes/functions.php). A simplistic yet incomplete example is:

$result = $auth->login($username, $password); // There are more params but they're optional

if ($result['status'] == LOGIN_SUCCESS)
{
    // Logged in
}
else
{
    // Something went wrong
}