By following the steps below, you can setup your own authentication driver that handles fetching and validating the user credentials using your API call:
1. Create your own custom user provider in app/Auth/ApiUserProvider.php with the following contents:
namespace App\Auth;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\UserProvider;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable as UserContract;
class ApiUserProvider implements UserProvider
{
/**
* Retrieve a user by the given credentials.
*
* @param array $credentials
* @return \Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable|null
*/
public function retrieveByCredentials(array $credentials)
{
$user = $this->getUserByUsername($credentials['username']);
return $this->getApiUser($user);
}
/**
* Retrieve a user by their unique identifier.
*
* @param mixed $identifier
* @return \Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable|null
*/
public function retrieveById($identifier)
{
$user = $this->getUserById($identifier);
return $this->getApiUser($user);
}
/**
* Validate a user against the given credentials.
*
* @param \Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable $user
* @param array $credentials
* @return bool
*/
public function validateCredentials(UserContract $user, array $credentials)
{
return $user->getAuthPassword() == $credentials['password'];
}
/**
* Get the api user.
*
* @param mixed $user
* @return \App\Auth\ApiUser|null
*/
protected function getApiUser($user)
{
if ($user !== null) {
return new ApiUser($user);
}
}
/**
* Get the use details from your API.
*
* @param string $username
* @return array|null
*/
protected function getUsers()
{
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, env('API_HOST') . 'vse/accounts');
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$response = json_decode($response, true);
curl_close($ch);
return $response['data'];
}
protected function getUserById($id)
{
$user = [];
foreach ($this->getUsers() as $item) {
if ($item['account_id'] == $id) {
$user = $item;
break;
}
}
return $user ?: null;
}
protected function getUserByUsername($username)
{
$user = [];
foreach ($this->getUsers() as $item) {
if ($item['email_address'] == $username) {
$user = $item;
break;
}
}
return $user ?: null;
}
// The methods below need to be defined because of the Authenticatable contract
// but need no implementation for 'Auth::attempt' to work and can be implemented
// if you need their functionality
public function retrieveByToken($identifier, $token) { }
public function updateRememberToken(UserContract $user, $token) { }
}
2. Also create a user class that extends the default GenericUser offered by the authentication system in app/Auth/ApiUser.php with the following contents:
namespace App\Auth;
use Illuminate\Auth\GenericUser;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable as UserContract;
class ApiUser extends GenericUser implements UserContract
{
public function getAuthIdentifier()
{
return $this->attributes['account_id'];
}
}
3. In your app/Providers/AuthServiceProvider.php file's boot method, register the new driver user provider:
public function boot(GateContract $gate)
{
$this->registerPolicies($gate);
// The code below sets up the 'api' driver
$this->app['auth']->extend('api', function() {
return new \App\Auth\ApiUserProvider();
});
}
4. Finally in your config/auth.php file set the driver to your custom one:
'driver' => 'api',
You can now do the following in your controller action:
public function postSignIn()
{
$username = strtolower(Input::get('username'));
$password = Input::get('password');
if (Auth::attempt(['username' => $username, 'password' => $password])) {
return Redirect::to('/dashboard')->with('success', 'Hi '. $username .'! You have been successfully logged in.');
} else {
return Redirect::to('/')->with('error', 'Username/Password Wrong')->withInput(Request::except('password'))->with('username', $username);
}
}
Calling Auth::user() to get user details after a successful login, will return an ApiUser instance containing the attributes fetched from the remote API and would look something like this:
ApiUser {#143 ▼
#attributes: array:10 [▼
"DBA" => ""
"account_id" => 111
"account_type" => "admin"
"display_name" => "BobJ"
"email_address" => "bob@xyzcorp.com"
"first_name" => "Bob"
"last_name" => "Jones"
"password" => "abc"
"message" => "Success"
"status" => 200
]
}
Since you haven't posted a sample of the response that you get when there's no match in the API for the user email, I setup the condition in the getUserDetails method, to determine that there's no match and return null if the response doesn't contain a data property or if the data property is empty. You can change that condition according to your needs.
The code above was tested using a mocked response that returns the data structure you posted in your question and it works very well.
As a final note: you should strongly consider modifying the API to handle the user authentication sooner rather than later (perhaps using a Oauth implementation), because having the password sent over (and even more worryingly as plain text) is not something you want to postpone doing.
