Simple Symfony Login Form Example

Tuesday, 18 November 2008

There are times when I just need a simple login form that checks for a certain username and password combination in order to lockdown a backend administration interface. The new sfForm sub-framework in Symfony 1.1/1.2 makes it really easy to reuse a Form class for this. If you’re unfamiliar with the new sfForm sub-framework, you should probably start with the Forms Book. Here’s an example form (placed in lib/form):

<?php

class LoginForm extends sfForm
{
  public function configure()
  {
    $this->setWidgets(array(
      'username' => new sfWidgetFormInput(), 
      'password' => new sfWidgetFormInputPassword() 
    ));

    $this->widgetSchema->setNameFormat('login[%s]');

    $this->setValidators(array(
      'username' => new sfValidatorChoice(array('required' => true, 'choices' => array('admin'))), 
      'password' => new sfValidatorChoice(array('required' => true, 'choices' => array('some_password')))
    ));
  }
}

The key here is using sfValidatorChoice to ensure that the input matches some predefined keys (“admin” and “some_password” in this case).

For completeness, here’s the action file:

<?php

class authActions extends sfActions
{
  public function executeLogin(sfWebRequest $request)
  {
    $this->form = new LoginForm();
 
    if ($request->isMethod('post'))
    {
      $this->form->bind($request->getParameter('login'));
      if ($this->form->isValid())
      {
        // authenticate user and redirect them
        $this->getUser()->setAuthenticated(true);
        $this->getUser()->addCredential('user');
        $this->redirect('home/index');
      }
    }
  }
  
  public function executeLogout()
  {
    $this->getUser()->clearCredentials();
    $this->getUser()->setAuthenticated(false);
    $this->redirect('@homepage');
  }
}

And the template file loginSuccess.php:

<form action="<?php echo url_for('auth/login') ?>" method="POST">
  <table>
    <?php echo $form ?>
    <tr>
      <td colspan="2">
        <input type="submit" />
      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</form>

And of course, you’ll want to turn on security for the application in security.yml:

default:
  is_secure: on
  credentials: user

by Mark Quezada

Simple Symfony Login Form Example