I've been trying to figure out a way to have my iframe Facebook app (built in PHP) work without requiring separate authentication methods. I am already logged into Facebook, but for some reason I still see all these Oauth notices from the example in the PHP SDK.
The only data I need is publicly available even without them "adding" my app. I am looking to collect their Facebook ID (since this is a contest, we need a unique ID for tracking), their name and (optionally) their email address as well.
The problem is, I cannot use the API to fetch the public information unless I already know their Facebook username. Any ideas on how I might be able to get their logged-in username or public handle so I can then fetch the rest of the information?
For whatever reason, Oauth is driving me completely insane with Facebook today.
Sidenote:
I did manage to technically get the Javascript SDK operational, which fed some information to PHP for use. The only issue there is that once I login, I don't see the data. If I refresh...then it shows up. Unsure why the refresh is required, as I wouldn't expect a user to actually have to hit refresh in order to proceed with the app.
I guess you are a bit confused here, Facebook will NOT share the username, id, full name or email without the user explicitly authorizing/allowing your application (and in the case of the email, requesting the email permission!).
Read the official Canvas Tutorial for more information:
In order to gain access to all the user information available to your
app by default (like the user's Facebook ID), the user must authorize
your app.
Related
I've spent the better part of a day researching this and thought I could figure this out on my own, but no luck.
Here's the situation, I have FB authentication in a mobile app. This is working fine. A user can log in and I can access the public profile data, etc.
The issue is that I would like to have NEW users or first time logins to create new records in my private database, because I am looking to store more than email, and FB id. For example, favorite items. I can also accomplish this easily enough with a post to (www.mywebsite.com/api/users/).
So, the REAL issue is that I don't want to have a route that simply allows people to add users to my database, willy-nilly.
Is there a way to pass the access token to an API route to ensure that a user can only add a new user-record to the db IF they have a valid FB login?
I've set up the famous "auth/facebook" route that is popular on the web which also works great, until I access it from my app. It then throws X-origin errors (I believe in part due to the callback route).
this post was similar, but still doesn't quite cover it.
Authenticating against a REST API with iOS client using Facebook SSO as the only login mechanism
Please help!
Thanks,
Wayne
After another two days of digging, I found a rather simple solution.
The facebook graph API will allow you to submit the access token to recieve basic user data.
So my solution is now this:
1. Use cordova-facebook4 plugin to authenticate within the app. (You can find details here: https://github.com/jeduan/cordova-plugin-facebook4
2. Send the FB id AND authentication token to my server route, like this: `myapiserver.com:1234/auth/facebook/<token>/<id>`
3. On the server side, send an ajax request to https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=<token received from the
cordova plugin>. This will return the name and FB ID as JSON.
4. On the server, compare the ID returned from facebook to the ID sent with the request. If they match, add the new user, if not, do
not add the user and return an error. Of course, the server will
not allow a new account to be added to the system if that FB id is
already in use.
At this point, it seems that the worst harm that could be done is for someone to hack another person's FB account, get their token and ID and THEN use that to create a user on my system for that person. Which seems pointless enough that I'm not going to worry about those attacks.
Please comment if you know of a better solution or I missed a security vulnerability.
Ref: How to get the Facebook user id using the access token
I am trying to have a custom facebook login page in my react meteor app. For example, I have my custom input fields (username and password) and I am trying to pass username/password values to facebook and validate. I do not want to use meteor account-ui. I found Meteor.loginWithFacebook which only checks to see if user is ALREADY logged in. Can someone help me to understand how I can use my custom username/password fields to get facebook user data?
Answer: That is not doable (or at least, should not be done, even if some workaround or hack exists, which I am unaware of).
What you can do is create your own authentication system, and give the user the option of either filling in the user details themselves, or using facebook login to fetch it from facebook. That ways, you have your own authentication, and also user's facebook profile.
Explanation:
The whole point of having openid (facebook, twitter, gmail, etc authentication) is to make signing up for a website/app convenient and SECURE.
If you use your custom user name and password field, then you can even store them, and that can give you access to user's facebook account. Even if you were not to do that, someone can easily hack into your website and steal the data to get access to your user's facebook account (your application would be way easier to hack into compared to facebook).
Hence, the facebook login api is such that the very sensitive task of accepting user name, password (facebook would never trust anyone else to do that for it), and validation of user is done by facebook, and you are given a token which tells you the user is logged in, and his basic profile (if you ask for it), and you do not have to worry about security, and the user himself feels safe, because he knows he is typing his user name and password in facebook.com, and not in somexyz.com
Update: It appears that when there's no API or token, software seems to simply ask the user for their account credentials, and probably has to store this information. I guess it can't be a huge security risk, since people are willing to share this information with apps like Mint:
So, my conclusion is that it is OK to ask users for credentials to other services if they can be secured safely and the user desires the service provided.
Many, many apps use others apps such as Facebook in order to get data from it, usually to verify the user is real and to get relevant profile data (e.g. a dating app would want age, gender, etc.).
When using such an app, I do not have to enter in my Facebook credentials. The app simply opens up my Facebook/asks for permission to access it, and voila it's done.
There seems to be a lot of documentation for well known companies like Facebook, Twitter, and PayPal on how to do this.
But how is it done for an arbitrary website that requires a user/profile, e.g. this website: http://ae.com/web/index.jsp
Unsurprisingly, if I google for FaceBook, there's a heap of resources, and even it's own dedicated tag (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens).
However, if I start googling for American Eagle, e.g. "https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=american+eagle+access+token&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8", I get nothing relevant at all.
If I understand your question right, that you want to enable facebook login for your website,
you still need to create a facebook app. then use the access tokens in your website. so when user clicks on login with facebook, the app will be asking for permissions and finally you will get the access token and you can use that in your site to log in.
My scenario is somewhat like this: A user logs into my website with his FB credentials. I capture his ID and the FB access token (say, a long-lived access token). He exits my website, and returns back later. However, this time, his browser has FB open with a different ID. Would I be able to load facebook details of this old id (with which he had registered on my site) using the stored access tokens? Is it possible, or would it result in a clash between the old and the existing FB id?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but he/she should stay logged into your website, regaurdless if his authID changes.
First of all, why would you want to do that? Since Facebook does not allow multiple user accounts for one and the same person, the only case where this would normally come into play is when another user is using my computer/browser – and why would I want you to read my info while that other person is using my device …?
Second of all, as long as the first user is still considered logged in to your site, it makes not much difference. But lets say some client-side method is called that updates the cookie information, then that’s where trouble might start. You might still be able to read the old user’s info, since you have his valid access token – but you’d have to use that token in your requests explicitly, and also address the account specifically, since the Graph API’s /me would point to the new user.
But as I said, I can hardly imagine a real, practical use case here …
I'm trying to implement facebook connect to my website, and i have couple questions.
1: Is it possible to register user in my website using his current facebook email/password.
Let's say user clicks on link Register via facebook and then he have to give me permisions to access his password, email, etc... and after that is done i put that info in my own database and he will be able to login with that account any time he wants without needing to give me permisions any time in the future.
2: If that kind of registration is not possible, what's other solution would be the best for me? Because i need to somehow keep track of that user who logged in with facebook, because he can upload photos, send messages etc.
Anyways, i'm quite new with facebook and similar things, so i'm really lost here, hope some one can help me :)
EDIT Thank you all for wonderful answers it helped me a lot, now all that's left is to read documentation :)
Yes it is, it is possible to get the information of the user. But it is rather complicated, when you have never dealt with it.
First you need to send the user to the following link:
https://m.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=your-client-id&redirect_uri=xxx&scope=listof-information-you-want
Facebook will then return your client to the uri specified, if the user rejected it will give a reason. If it is not you will get an code in urlencoded format.
This code is needed for the following step, the request of the access token:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?redirect_uri=xxx&client_id=xxx&client_secret=xxx&code=xxxx
This will give back an access token, if the authorization didn't fail.
After that you can ask for the information you want:
https://graph.facebook.com/me?method=GET&metadata=true&format=json&access_token=access_token
This will include a facebook uid, which is unique for all users. Store it and you can discern between a register and login.
This is roughly the process for any oauth2 application.
Facebook will not ask repeatedly for permissions after the user granted them to you. So you can store the access token and reuse it for backend stuff and also use the same procedure you use for register for login.
You can never access the user's password from Facebook even with his/her permission, so the user will always have to authenticate via Facebook and have Facebook pass you the user id of the logged in user once authentication succeeds. You can store all kinds of other data locally, but not enough to authenticate the user yourself.
Once the user is authenticated, you'll have access to the user's Facebook user id via the API, which should be enough to connect all kinds of information to that specific user.
Facebook does not provide access to accounts when passwords are taken from your controls. It provides it own canvas for login information. Therefore you cannot use your first approach to store passwords in your databases. Check this out.
You can however store email addresses once user logins into his account using the facebook sdks. Check this out link for the example of C# SDK sample code.
You can use the Facebook APIs to fetch user email-id, photos, friendslist and other information and then play around accordingly.
You don't get access to the users password - only email if you ask for it.
Best way would be to have a table of users and their Facebook account id's.
If you want to allow users to sign up without Facebook then have a nullable field for their password and facebook id, and also have a field for username - which you could populate from Facebook if they register via that route.