Extension:PluggableAuth

The PluggableAuth extension provides a framework for creating authentication and authorization extensions.

Authentication is the process of proving that a user is who they say they are. This may be done, for example, by providing a username and password or some token or biometric.

The following authentication extensions can be used with PluggableAuth:


 * - uses LDAP
 * - uses Naylor Association Management Software
 * - uses OpenID Connect
 * - uses Shibboleth
 * - uses SAML
 * - uses Steam authentication
 * - uses OAuth

Authorization is the process of determining whether a particular authenticated user should have access to a particular resource. This may be done, for example, by checking a list of authorized email addresses or checking values of user attributes provided by an identity server.

In PluggableAuth's case, authorization extensions determine if an authenticated user may proceed with logging in to a wiki. However, the authentication extensions (rather than the authorization extensions) take care of which user groups a user should be authorized for, based on the attributes passed from the identity provider (IdP).

The following authorization extensions can be used with PluggableAuth:


 * - uses a list of email addresses and domains
 * - uses LDAP

PluggableAuth must be used with one or more authentication plugins and zero or more authorization plugins. If more than one authentication plugin is used, a button for each authentication plugin will be added to the  page. If a single authentication plugin is used and local login is disabled, the  page will be bypassed. If no authorization plugins are used, all authenticated users will be authorized to use the wiki.

PluggableAuth defines two important hooks:


 * - enables authorization plugins to provide code to make an authorization decision
 * - used to augment MediaWiki's group information with that from an external provider

Creating an authentication plugin
Authentication plugins subclass the abstract class provided by PluggableAuth. In version 6.0 and later, an authentication plugin must specify at  section in. (Example coming soon) In versions 5.7 and earlier, an authentication plugin must set to the name of this subclass.


 * Called to authenticate the user.
 * The parameters are used to return the user id, username, real name, and email address of the authenticated user and, if the user cannot be authenticated, an optional error message.   is an integer and the remaining parameters are all strings.  If the user cannot be authenticated and no value is set for , a default error message is displayed.
 * must be set to  if the user is new, in which case  will add the user to the database.
 * Must return true if the user has been authenticated and false otherwise.
 * If the return to URL, the name of the page, or the query parameters from the page that login was initiated from are necessary in the authenticate function, they may be accessed as follows:


 * Called after a new user has been authenticated and added to the database to add any additional information to the database required by the authentication mechanism.


 * Called when the user logs out to notify the identity provider, if necessary, that cleanup such as removing the user's session should be done.

Special:UserLogin and extra login fields (Version 5.7 and earlier only)
The page will only be displayed to the user during authentication if there are fields on that form that the user must fill in.

That is, if an authentication plugin does not add extra fields to the form using  and if local login (which enables the username and password fields on the  form) is not enabled by a site administrator using , the  page will not be displayed.

Even if is not displayed, it may be necessary for an authentication plugin to gather user input using a web page provided by an enterprise authentication system. This would be accomplished by a redirect, often from within the authentication library used by the authentication plugin.

If no such library exists and you need to implement the authentication mechanism from scratch, the redirect should not go to. Instead, it should go to a custom, unlisted special page based on. Finally, if there is no user input required by the user as part of authentication from either or the remote authentication system, clicking on the Log in link will simply re-render the current page in a logged in state.

If an authentication plugin adds extra fields to the form using , the fields can be accessed in the  function in an authentication plugin as follows:

This will return an array of field values indexed by the name of the field from the field descriptor array.

Creating an authorization plugin
Authorization hooks use the hook to register an implementation of the following function:


 * is the User object for the user requesting authorization
 * must be set to true if the user is authorized and false otherwise.
 * Return true to call other authorization hook implementations and false to skip them.

Release notes

 * Version 6.0
 * Support multiple authentication plugins using
 * Requires MediaWiki 1.35+
 * Drop support for  (use index in   instead),   (no replacement), and   (replaced by  )


 * Version 5.7
 * Added error message when there is a rare fatal session error


 * Version 5.6
 * Fixed autologin so it returns to the correct page after authentication.


 * Version 5.5
 * Fixed issue with hook.


 * Version 5.4
 * Added and.
 * Coding style fixes.


 * Version 5.3
 * Added.


 * Version 5.2
 * Converted auto login to PHP from JavaScript.


 * Version 5.1
 * Added hook. Thank you to Poikilotherm for contributing this functionality.


 * Version 5.0
 * Added and removed use of editmyprivateinfo
 * Added debug statement when returntourl is not set


 * Version 4.2
 * Fixed exception when returntoquery is undefined.


 * Version 4.1
 * Added session variables to hold the name of the page and the query parameters of the page from which login was initiated for use in


 * Version 4.0
 * Added optional error message to
 * Bumped version number to synchronize with SimpleSAMLphp and OpenIDConnect extensions


 * Version 2.2
 * Confirm email addresses coming from external authentication sources


 * Version 2.1
 * Update file naming conventions


 * Version 2.0
 * Almost completely rewritten to support the new MediaWiki 1.27 authentication and session management framework
 * Switched to new extension registration
 * Configuration variable names changed to add $wg prefix
 * removed
 * renamed to
 * added to support local password-based login to the wiki in addition to PluggableAuth


 * Version 1.2
 * Moved the addition of a new user to the wiki database to after successful authorization of the user
 * Added check


 * Version 1.1
 * Added call to logout when session times out to ensure that the deauthenticate function in implementing classes gets called


 * Version 1.0
 * Initial version