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phpmysqlfirebasefirebase-authenticationcustom-authentication

Authenticate with PHP and interact with JS in Firebase

I am having a PHP based application, that uses MySQL as the DB. I am currently trying to build a real-time messaging system for the users in the application. I have found Firebase to be a very good solution for building this. However, I am not sure if the architecture I am planning is compatible with the architecture am planning. Digging through the documentation didn't really get me the answers.

My Doubts are:

  1. I don't want users to again login to use chat, so I want to authenticated via the server (i.e from php).

  2. I want, the further chat/messaging to happen from client to Firebase directly as I don't want to have unwanted overhead on my server, especially when a direct connection is not only supported but also efficient.

  3. Can I authenticate via php and get some secret key or something and then use that to connect securely via Js?

I found this link which talks about custom authentication system. But am not sure, if this is what I have to use. And if the solution am planning is scalable and ok.

Solution
    1. Firebase Auth persists the session on the client via localStorage/indexedDB and is a headless API that doesn't require a hosted server. So you are not required to authenticate the user via your server.
    2. You can definitely build the messaging app entirely on the client with real-time database without routing traffic to your server. Here is an example of a chat app built with Firebase: https://github.com/firebase/friendlychat
    3. If you already have an existing authentication system, you can use custom auth which requires that you mint a custom token after you authenticate a user with your system, you then send that custom token to the client and then signInWithCustomToken. Here is some code to create a custom token with PHP: https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/create-custom-tokens#create_custom_tokens_using_the_firebase_admin_sdk If you don't have an existing auth system, you can entirely run the authentication on the client side. Another good library for authentication that is built on top of Firebase is FirebaseUI: https://github.com/firebase/firebaseui-web