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Protect a Page with Login in PHP

This guide shows how to create a simple PHP application and secure access to the app with Ory. You can use this guide with both Ory Cloud and self-hosted Ory software.

This guide is perfect for you if:

  1. You have PHP installed.
  2. You want to build an app using PHP.
  3. You want to give access to your application to signed-in users only.

Before you start, watch this video to see the user flow you're going to implement:

info

You can find the code of the sample application here.

Create PHP App​

First we create a new PHP project:

mkdir your-project
cd your-project
touch index.php

Install Dependencies​

To interact with Ory's APIs we install the Ory SDK:

composer require ory/client:^v0.0.1-alpha

To simplify URLs handling we install the bramus/router

composer require bramus/router

To install Ory CLI follow this guide

Why do I Need the Ory CLI?​

The Ory CLI includes useful functionality to manage your Ory Cloud Project. But that is not why we require it in this guide!

Ory's philosophy is to make hard things easy for you. For this reason, Ory has deployed measures against all OWASP Top 10 and implements the OWASP Authentication Cheat Sheet along other mechanisms.

Therefore, Ory manages Anti-CSRF Cookies as well as Ory Session Cookies for you. That however requires that Ory and your application run on the same domain!

If your application runs on http://localhost:3000 then Ory needs to be available on the hostname localhost as well (e.g. http://localhost:3001). That is why we need the Ory CLI, because it has a proxy included which mirrors Ory's API endpoints on the domain of your application.

Ory Proxy mirrors Ory's APIs

Create an Entry Page​

This is a working example of basic index.php script which creates an Ory client, registers new route for our Dashboard and makes use of Before Route Middlewares to validate if the user is allowed to view the Dashboard.

<?php
  require 'vendor/autoload.php';
  require_once 'app.php';

  error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_PARSE);

  $proxyPort = getenv("PROXY_PORT");
  if ($proxyPort == "") $proxyPort = "4000";

  $app = new App;
  // register a new Ory client with the URL set to the Ory CLI Proxy
  // we can also read the URL from the env or a config file
  $config = Ory\Client\Configuration::getDefaultConfiguration()->setHost(sprintf("http://localhost:%s/.ory", $proxyPort));
  $app->ory = new Ory\Client\Api\V0alpha2Api(new GuzzleHttp\Client(), $config);

  $router = new \Bramus\Router\Router();
  $router->before('GET', '/', $app->validateSession());
  $router->get('/', $app->printDashboard());
  $router->run();
?>

Validate and Login​

Next we will create handler which will check with your Ory project if the user has a valid session. Notice here that we are taking the current request cookies and passing them along to the Ory client.

If the session is not valid the request is redirected to the Ory project for login. At this point we have not set up any custom UI management and thus will be shown the Ory Managed UI login page.

For the last part we need to add the Dashboard handler (the page we would like to protect) which will render an HTML with the session data.

This is accomplished by the simple App class stored in the app.php file:

<?php

  class App {
      // save the session to display it on the dashboard
      private ?Ory\Client\Model\Session $session;
      public ?Ory\Client\Api\V0alpha2Api $ory;

      public function validateSession(){
          $cookies = "";
          // set the cookies on the ory client
          foreach ($_COOKIE as $key=>$value) {
              $cookies .= "$key=$value;";
          }

          try {
              // check if we have a session
              $session = $this->ory->toSession("", $cookies);
              if (! $session["active"]) throw new Exception('Session expired');
          } catch (Exception $e) {
              error_log('Exception when calling V0alpha2Api->toSession: '.$e->getMessage());
              // this will initialize a new login flow and Kratos will redirect the user to the login UI
              header("Location: /.ory/self-service/login/browser", true, 303);
              die();
          }
          $this->session = $session;
      }

      public function printDashboard(){
          echo '
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <title>Ory Cloud secured Go web app</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Dashboard</h1>
    <hr />
    <h2>Your Session Data:</h2>
    <pre><code>', json_encode($this->session, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT), '</code></pre>
</body>
</html>
';
      }
  }
?>

Run your App​

Start your HTTP server and access the proxy URL

php -S 127.0.0.1:3000
# This is a public Ory Cloud Project.
# Don’t submit any personally identifiable information in requests made with this project.
# Sign up for Ory Cloud at
#
#   https://console.ory.sh/registration
#
# and create a free Ory Cloud Project to see your own configuration embedded in code samples!
export ORY_SDK_URL=https://{your-project-slug-here}.projects.oryapis.com
ory proxy http://localhost:3000

To access the PHP app through the ORY proxy open http://localhost:4000 in your browser. You are presented with Ory's Sign In page! Let's click on sign up and create your first user!

Go to Production​

Going to production with your app is possible in many ways. Whether you deploy it on Kubernetes, AWS, a VM, or a RaspberryPi is up to you. To get your app working with Ory, your app and Ory must be available under the same common domain (e.g. https://ory.example.com and https://www.example.com).

The easiest way to connect Ory to your domain is to connect Ory to a subdomain of yours. You can do this easily by adding a Custom Domain to your Cloud project!

With the custom domain set up, you do not need the Ory Proxy anymore and will use the configured custom domain in your SDK calls:

$config = Ory\Client\Configuration::getDefaultConfiguration()->setHost("https://ory.example.org"));
$ory = new Ory\Client\Api\V0alpha2Api(new GuzzleHttp\Client(), $config);