Question

I’d like to e-mail all my users a link to a symfony site that I am writing, and have it so that when they follow that link they are logged in to the site (probably with a special role, like IS_AUTHENTICATED_REMEMBERED), and redirected to a certain page. How can I do this?

So the link would be something like:

http://example.com/?key=[some sort secret key with their account encoded in it]

Answer 1

Inspired by this message and this code, I wrote a controller that gets the user from the database, verifies the secret key, then fakes a login token as follows:

$providerKey = 'secured_area'; // Name of firewall from security.yml - not sure this is correct.
$token = new UsernamePasswordToken($user, null, $providerKey, array('AUTO_LOGIN'));

$this->container->get('security.context')->setToken($token);

(you need this at the top of your file)

use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Authentication\Token\UsernamePasswordToken;

It seems to work, and the user has a role of AUTO_LOGIN so I can easily restrict them from accessing more sensitive stuff until they have logged in with a username and password as normal.