Symfony

Customizing FOSUserBundle

Christian Scheb

Recently I was working on a project with FOSUserBundle. It was best choice instead of implementing the whole user system from scratch. Unfortunately, after a while it became clear, that the bundle doesn’t fulfil all of my requirements and therefore I had to make some modifications. I’ve found the solutions not to be totally obvious, so I decided to write it together in this blog post. Another post on FOSUserBundle is my tutorial how to change the password constraints in FOSUserBundle.

Note: This post is about the 1.3 version of FOSUserBundle. Version 2.0 is not stable yet, but it has much better extensibility.

The first thing to do, when extending the bundle, is to create a new bundle, which extends the original FOSUserBundle. This will enable you to overwrite controllers and configuration files with your own implementation. I’ll call it Acme\UserBundle in the following examples.

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Filter Tabs in Sonata Admin

Christian Scheb

When working regularly with Sonata bundles, you’ve might come accross their MediaBundle, which integrates a media management module. You certainly recognized that there is something different in the list view: A tabbed navigation to filter media items. This is how it looks like in the current 2.3 branch:

filter-tabs

Screenshot of the Sonata Demo

I think this is very useful, because you can filter very quickly – literally with one click – instead of wasting three steps on the datagrid (focus widget, select/type value, click filter button). Unfortunately the tab feature is not documented, so I tried to figure out how it works. Here is a tutorial how you can add filter tabs to your own Sonata Admin modules.

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New features in my two-factor authentication bundle

Christian Scheb

In the last days SchebTwoFactorBundle has received some major updates. The current version is v0.3.0. I want to give you a brief overview of what has changed and how to use those features.

The biggest change so far was the refactoring of the authentication layer. I’ve removed a bunch of duplicate code and implemented an abstract interface for the two-factor authentication, which can be extended with any kind of authentication method. This enables the users of the bundle to implement their own authentication methods quite easily. Take a look at the documentation how it works.

Besides this I’ve added a “trusted computer” feature, that has been suggested by a contributor. An optional checkbox is shown in the authentication form, which makes it possible to flag your machine as “trusted”. Then the whole two-factor process will be skipped once you’ve completed the authentication process. The feature supports multiple computers and multiple users on the same machine.

I hope those features are useful and they help to secure your projects with an two-factor mechanism that’s easy to implement.

Say Hello to SchebTwoFactorBundle

Christian Scheb

I’ve recently done some posts about how to integrate two-factor authentication and Google Authenticator into Symfony2. I thought to myself “Why not make a bundle from it?” and that’s what i did: Say hello to SchebTwoFactorBundle. Now it’s dead simple to add two-factor authentication to your own website. Add the bundle via Composer and enable the authentication method you want.

Currently it supports both the email and the Google Authenticator method I’ve blogged about. It already has some features for customization, but I’m thinking about making it more flexible. Maybe some generic two-factor implementation, which allows you to plug in different kinds of two-factor modules.

 

Google Authenticator in Symfony

Christian Scheb

If you want to add two-factor (2fa) authentication with Google Authenticator to your project, please use the scheb/2fa bundle for Symfony.
The approach in this blog post is no longer valid and potentially harmful to your application’s security. So don’t do it. Use the bundle instead.

This is the follow up to previous post about two-factor authentication in Symfony2. As promised I also want to show you how to integrate Google Authenticator into your project. If you haven’t read my first post, I’d suggest doing it now, because it explains the principle more in detail. The following example code is widely identical to SonataUserBundle‘s integration.

To get started, you’ll have to install the Sonata Google Authenticator package. If you’re using composer (I guess so), you can simply execute:

php composer.phar require sonata-project/google-authenticator dev-master

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Two-Factor Authentication (2fa) in Symfony

Christian Scheb

If you want to add two-factor (2fa) authentication to your project, please use the scheb/2fa bundle for Symfony.
The approach in this blog post is no longer valid and potentially harmful to your application’s security. So don’t do it. Use the bundle instead.

For a project of mine I wanted to have some extra security because it contains critical features, only authorized people should have access to in any case. So I did some research if it’s possible to implement two-factor authentication in Symfony2. Sadly I didn’t find any good how-tos about that topic. Then I’ve found out that SonataUserBundle has Google Authenticator as an optional feature, so I did some reverse enginering to figure out how they did it.

This is how you implement two-factor authentication into Symfony2’s security layer. The following example will send out a random code to the user’s email address. I will do another post for Google Authenticator soon.

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Password constraints in FOSUserBundle

Christian Scheb

I’ve recently tried to modify the password constraints of FOSUserBundle. To my surprise I’ve discovered that this is a little bit tricky.

Before you start I would suggest taking a look at validation.xml in the config directory of FOSUserBundle There you’ll find all the pre-defined constraints. As you can see, there is a class named FOS\UserBundle\Form\Model\ChangePassword. This is the data class, which is used in the change password form instead of the actual entity. So you have to change the password constraints on the User as well as on the ChangePassword class.

I have a bundle, which is extending FOSUserBundle, so I thought it is straight forward: Create a validation.xml which is overwriting the original one and put my own constraints in there. Unfortunatley that doesn’t work, instead my own constraints will simply be added to the default ones. So how to get rid of them? The trick is to define your own validation group.

This is how my configuration for the ChangePassword class looks like. The same goes for the User class.

By default FOSUserBundle is using the ChangePassword group to validate the change password form. With some extra lines in config.yml you can tell it to use a different one:

fos_user:
    change_password:
        form:
            validation_groups: [MyChangePassword, Default]

Now FOSUserBundle is using the MyChangePassword validation group for validation. This is also working for other forms like registration or the user profile. Take a look at the class FOS\UserBundle\DependencyInjection\Configuration and search for validation_groups to find out more about the configuration.

Default Values for Parameters

Christian Scheb

Sometimes it makes sense to have a default value for parameters. This can be done by creating a new file parameters_default.yml (can be any name you like) and adding it to config.yml just before parameters.yml.

imports:
    - { resource: parameters_default.yml }
    - { resource: parameters.yml }
parameters:
    locale: en
    secret: abcdefg1234567890

Now you can overwrite the default values in parameters.yml on demand but you’re not longer forced to define those parameters.

parameters:
    locale: de

Using Parameters in Routes

Christian Scheb

You can use parameters from parameters.yml in routes. There are serveral use-cases when this may be useful.

Let’s say you want to localize your routes but you want to store the list of available locales only once. Then you could define a parameter in config.yml:

parameters:
    allowed_locales: en|de|fr

Now you can use the parameter in your routing.yml:

some_bundle:
    resource: "@MyBundle/Controller/"
    prefix:   /{_locale}
    type:     annotation
    requirements:
        _locale: %allowed_locales%

Another use-case is routes based on a hostname. Instead of writing the hostname directly into routing.yml you could use a parameter, as seen in the official documentation.

As fas as I know parameters only work for routes defined in YAML, XML or PHP. If it also works for annotation routes, please let me know.