Symfony2 authentication provider: authenticate against webservice

The past few days I have really be struggeling with the Symfony2 security component. It is the most complex component of Symfony2 if you ask me! On the symfony.com website there is a pretty neat cookbook article about creating a custom authentication provider. Despite the fact that it covers the subject pretty well, it lacks support for form-based authentication use cases. In the current Symfony2 project I’m working on, we’re dealing with a web service that we need to authenticate against. So the cookbook article was nothing more then a good introduction unfortunately.

Using DaoAuthenticationProvider as example

Since we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, a good place to start is by investigating the providers that are in the Symfony2 core. The DaoAuthenticationProvider is a very good example, and used by the default form login. We are going to add a few pieces of code, so we can use the listener and configuration settings. The only thing we want to change are the authentication itself and the user provider. If you take a look at the link above, you will see the only thing we need to change is the checkAuthentication method. But, a few more steps are needed in order to make things function correctly. Let’s begin! 🙂

We also need a UserProvider!

First things first: we need a custom user provider. The task of the user provider is load the user from a source so the authentication process can continue. Because a user can already be registered at the webservice a traditional database user provider won’t work. We need to create a local record for every user that registers or logs in and doesn’t have an account. So basically the user provider is only responsible for loading and creating a user record. In this example I save the user immediately when there is no record; probably you want to do this after authenticating.

The code for the use provider looks like this:

We add it to our services configuration in app/config/services.yml:

Creating the AuthenticationProvider

As I said earlier we are going to base our provider on the DaoAuthenticationProvider. In my bundle I created a new class called ServiceAuthenticationProvider. Like our example we are extending the abstract UserAuthenticationProvider. Besides the checkAuthentication method we also must implement the retrieveUser method. We inject the service through the constructor, so the class looks like this:

Note the call to $this->service->authenticate where the magic happens. The retrieveUser method receives a User instance from our user provider. Although this is not really clear in the code above, it will be after configuration in the service container. We use the configuration from the Symfony core and adjust it to our needs:

Please note the empty arguments. Look a bit strange, huh? These will be magically filled when the container is build by our Factory! This is a bit tricky, and the cookbook explains pretty wel, so I suggest to take a look there. We are extending the FormLoginFactory because we want to change it bit:

Add the builder in the Acme\DemoBundle\AcmeDemoBundle.php file:

Finally, change your security config:

The webservice-login key activates our authentication provider. The user provider is defined under providers as acme_provider with the corresponding service id.
I used the AcmeDemo bundle from symfony-standard repository, so you could just copy paste most of my code to see everything in action! Only thing you need to provide yourself is a dummy webservice.

Happy coding!