CakePhp 3 Plugin Authentication adapter was not found

Question

I'm kinda a newbie in Cakephp (3.5) and I'm currently trying to make my first plugin (called Example) which contains several sub-directories. One of them is the UserManager directory which contains a Users MVC standard suit with authentication.

Since I want to add social logins and other stuffs, I created my own auth component as explained in the docs :

plugins/Example/UserManager/src/Controller/AppController.php

<?php

namespace Example\UserManager\Controller;

use App\Controller\AppController as BaseController;

class AppController extends BaseController
{
    public function initialize()
    {
        parent::initialize();
        $this->loadComponent('Auth', [
            'authenticate' => [
                'Example/UserManager.Example' => [
                    'fields' => ['username' => 'email', 'password' => 'pass'],
                    'userModel' => 'Users',
                ],
            ], 
        ]);
    }
}

plugins/Example/UserManager/src/Auth/ExampleAuthenticate.php

<?php

namespace App\Auth;

use Cake\Auth\BaseAuthenticate;
use Cake\Http\ServerRequest;
use Cake\Http\Response;  

class ExampleAuthenticate extends BaseAuthenticate
{
    // The same as Form authentication, since I'm testing
}

The problem is that I can't make the authentication component find the ExampleAuthenticate class. I already tried by setting the authenticate config param like

• Example
• ExampleAuthenticate
• UserManager.Example
• Example/UserManager.Example
• Example\UserManager.Example
• Example/UserManager.ExampleAuthenticate
• Example\UserManager.ExampleAuthenticate

but I always get the error Authentication adapter "..." was not found. when visiting http://localhost/Project/example/user-manager/users :(

Does anyone have any clue of what I might be missing?

Answer 1

The problem was that the php function class_exists(...) didn't recognise the custom authentication class, so after digging a bit more I realised that the namespace shown in the docs only works for a custom authentication file defined in the App environment, but not in the Plugin one (silly me).

So I changed namespace App\Auth; to namespace Example\UserManager\Auth; inside ExampleAuthenticate.php and it worked like a charm! now the function class_exists('Example\\UserManager\\Auth\\ExampleAuthenticate') returns true and everything works perfect by defining Example/UserManager.Example in the authenticate config params.