I want to add social sign-in feature to my Google App Engine based application and hence want to add Google's authentication mechanism along with FB log-in.
I am confused because Google has provided at least 3 different ways to do this.
Google+ sign-in (https://developers.google.com/+/web/signin/server-side-flow)
Users service provided on Google App Engine
Federated Authentication (https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/openid)
I would like to know which method is the most recent and which method is used widely?
Thanks,
Chandrashekhar
#1 Google+ Sign In allows users to log in via OAuth 2.0, but requires users to have Google Plus enabled. Google+ Sign In also provides additional functionality to the Google+ APIs such as sharing and social integration. However, you could just use standard OAuth 2.0 for login, which removes the Google+ requirement.
#2 Users Service is a Google App Engine API. It allows any user with a Google Account to login. This is different to OAuth 2.0 - it uses Googles standard login pages and you can use it right out of the box without having to configure any OAuth scopes etc. You can get going with this very quickly.
#3 Federated Login integrates the Open ID standard with the Google App Engine Users API. This allows your users to log in with an Open ID (ie credentials they have registered with an 'Open ID provider'), and you to use the standard Users Service API. There are many Open ID providers out there, including Google.
Your question states that you want to add a "social sign-in feature" along with "FB log-in". So, that basically rules #1 & #2 out. Unfortunately, Facebook (and Twitter) are not Open ID providers, so that kind of rules #3 out too. For these, you will need to implement their own authentication mechanisms (Facebook Login and Sign in with Twitter). There is a great boilerplate repo on GitHub that has some code (in python) to help you get going.
Related
I'm new to web dev, and trying to build an application using google app engine's java standard environment, which will require user authentication. I'd like to provide authentication which requires only a username and password of the user, as opposed to a phone number or social account.
As I look through the options listed in app engine's auth tutorial, if I'm understanding them correctly, none of them allow login without a phone number or social account? https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java/oauth/
If so, are there alternatives available while still using app engine? I've read some about 'web container managed authentication' but I'm not sure if its something app engine will support, or if its a full solution.
Is it possible/feasible to roll fully custom authentication in the app engine standard environment? As I search for custom authentication tutorials I see a lot of articles recommending against this, but it's not clear to me what the alternative is.
Thanks for any information
As it's mention on the OpenID Connect documents of Google Cloud, it's important for you and your users security to authenticate using well proven and debugged code. Google offers Firebase Authentication which let's users log in with an Email and password.
If you still want to implement the authorize part on your own, you can use your preferred web framework and probably it will have an authorizing process.
For example, in python you can use Django authorize system to provide users for a custom way to log in.
But, as I said before, I highly recommend you to use the Google APIs for authorizing as they are OpenID certificated.
I used "gae.api.users" to check if the logged users was me (users.is_current_user_admin());-)
But this api is no more available. How can I do the same kind of thing with GAE/py37 ?
From the Users section of the Understanding differences between Python 2 and Python 3 on the App Engine standard environment guide:
The Users service is not available in Python 3. You can use any
HTTP-based authentication mechanism, such as:
Google Identity Platform, which provides many options for authentication and authorization of Google user accounts.
Firebase Authentication, which provides authentication using username/password and federated identity using Google, Facebook,
Twitter, and more.
Note: Because the Users service is not available, it is not possible to use app.yaml to make URLs accessible only by
administrators.
In my new web application, I want to authenticate users by letting them sign in with their Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts. Does App Engine's "Google+ Sign-In" capability allow this? If not, is there another platform (e.g. Heroku) that would let me write straightforward code that will accomplish this?
BACKGROUND: I can find nothing in the Google+ Sign-In documentation that talks about authenticating with any site other than Google.
However, various pages (this one and this one) show a Google+ Sign-In screen that also has a "Sign In With Facebook" button in screenshots, but it's not clear if this Facebook button is supported by App Engine's Google+ Sign-In API, or was hand-rolled with OAuth2. Same with the "Sign In With Twitter" button.
I believe that, even if OpenID Connect were available, neither Facebook nor Twitter would participate -- except that OpenID Connect is built on OAuth2, which would allow them to participate. However, App Engine has deprecated OAuth2 (see this page). So I am pretty confused about what is possible and what is not.
To support multiple authentication services (e.g. Google, Twitter, FB..) you should go with OAuth2.
One such library that works with GAE (for Java) is pac4j. It lets you authenticate and access users profiles.
App engine has by default an integrated google sign in features, which gives back the current authenticated user email and ID (permission is asked to the user before).
I was wondering if the app engine has an option to extend to permissions asked to the user to include more scopes for examples (contact information, manage youtube account).
Or is it only possible via oauth authentication?
No, you can only do this via OAuth.
User API uses OpenID which does not support "scopes". OAuth does support scopes so you should use it if you need broader access to users profile.
i would like to provide a third party user authentication on my app engine app.
the federated login option on appengine is not exactly what I'm looking for and i can't see endpoints
what i want is authenticating users via openid like its done here on stackoverflow.
the first time a user has to authorize the app and the subsequent times it will only need to be logged in or log in again on the third party app and then redirected to my app.
my app is written in python and im using tornado web as a framework. i've seen that tornado has its own auth module i want to check out but i wanted to ask for suggestions before jumping into code.
basically i would like users to be able to log in via facebook, twitter and google.
the facebook authentication seems not to be that hard on graph.facebook.com but its not easy to test
authenticating via twitter looks more difficult to me and i can't find any clear examples.
i would love to hear your experiences/suggestions about it.
What you describe is exactly how federated login with OpenId works on App Engine. Whether or not users get prompted for authorization after the first login is up to the OpenId provider, not the consumer.
Facebook login doesn't use OpenID, and you'd need to implement that yourself, in conjunction with a sessions library to keep track of logged in Facebook users.