Tag: library

OAuth 2.0 PHP Library

Alex Bilbie / / Announcements, Code

Throughout the Linkey project I’ve been working on a number of PHP libraries that aim to make working with OAuth 2.0 easier.

The library is now at version 2.1, implements the entire core OAuth 2.0 specification and bearer token specification and has had over 1800 installations at the time of writing.

I’m very happy to announce that the University of Lincoln has agreed to transfer ownership of the code to the “PHP League of Extraordinary Packages” which means that it’ll continue to receive updates and be maintained by a number of developers around the world (myself included).

The server repository is now hosted at https://github.com/php-loep/oauth2-server and the client library is now hosted at https://github.com/php-loep/oauth2-client.

I have updated the wikis on both repositories with thorough documentation about how to use each library, and on the server library wiki I’ve added a lot more implementation about how to implement the library for common use cases.

My intention with all the code that has been written as an output of this project was that it would be as easy to use as possible and I’ve had some great feedback from developers:

— “Thanks for making your OAuth 2.0 server library public! It is people like you that make my job slightly more tolerable :)”

— “I wanted to thank you for your awesome library @alexbilbie :)”

— “Thank you for the great posts and lib”

— “If you drink, I will buy you a virtual beer!! What you built is awesome”

And finally in reply to a question that a developer asked me about how to do something with the library:

— “I’m really not surprised it was that simple – you’ve really built this with the end developer in mind. Once again, thanks very much for the info and the repo.”

To conclude I’m really happy with the code, I’ve learnt an awful lot as it has been developed and refined and I’m pleased that it’s new home will ensure long term sustainability.

PHP, meet OAuth 2.0

Alex Bilbie / / Announcements, News

Over the last few months I’ve been developing a PHP library that helps you work with OAuth 2.0 in a number of different ways:

  • Develop an authentication server which can be used as part of a web “single sign on” solution.
  • Secure your APIs with access tokens and scopes.
  • Easily sign users in to many different OAuth 2.0 identity providers.

The code for the authentication and resource server can be found on Github here https://github.com/lncd/OAuth2.

The server library code requires PHP 5.3+, is hooked into Packagist (a bit like Ruby Gems but for PHP) and has 100% unit test code coverage. It has built in support for the following grants:

You can easily create you own grants by extending \OAuth2\Grant\GrantInterface. I’m going to be creating plugins which support JSON web tokens and the SAML assertions.

The code for the client library can be found here https://github.com/lncd/OAuth2-Client – at the time of writing it isn’t quite finished, I’ll blog when it is.

Over the next few blog posts I’ll document how to use the libraries.

Quick update

Alex Bilbie / / Uncategorized

I’ve not blogged in a little while so I thought I’d give an update on what is happening with Linkey.

First I’ve been working with Paul in the library to capture (videos and screenshots) examples of poor user experience accessing various resources including electronic journals and databases, printers, and users’ library accounts.

I’ve also been trawling through last year’s NSS results to find examples of where students particularly struggled to access IT and library resources. I will then produce visualisations of these.

It is important to capture these examples so that hopefully by the end of the project we can show how we’ve improved the situation.

This week we launched our Ezproxy service [note: requires authentication] which has already improved accessing a number of resources including articles from the American Chemical Society, EBSCO Publishing and Oxford University Press.

I’ve also been working away at the new PHP OAuth library. Originally this was just going to be code for implementing an authentication server and a resource server, but now it is also going to include client code too thanks to Phil Sturgeon offering to integrate his existing code. As a result we’re going to have a lean and mean library that can help anyone work with any aspect of OAuth 2.