Hi, I’m so glad I found this thread! I was desperately trying to add my YubiKey on a Discourse instance, which wasn’t working correctly — so I thought, well, maybe these guys are self-hosting and have a configuration error of some sort. Then I thought I could Google for it — and saw that meta.discourse.org seemed to have mentioned this at some point.
Unfortunately, my attempt to set things up in Brave (Chromium) utterly failed, as before, and just like the OP reported.
Here is my setup:
- macOS Big Sur 11.7.9 (20G1426) running on an ancient Apple MacBook Pro.
- YubiKey 5 NFC Firmware: 5.4.3
Browsers:
- Brave [Chromium] Version 1.73.91 Chromium: 131.0.6778.85 (Official Build) (x86_64)
- Safari: [WebKit] 16.6.1 (16615.3.12.11.5, 16615)
- Firefox: [Gecko] 133.0
- Microsoft Edge: [Chromium] Version 131.0.2903.70 (Official build) (x86_64)
So, I launched Safari, proceeded to add a passkey, started with a software-based passkey, which Safari liked and Discourse accepted; then, additionally, I tried to add the YubiKey 5 NFC as a passkey and as an additional 2FA confirmation — and Discourse had no problems in accepting everything!
Once that was configured, I tested out with Firefox, and it worked immediately; the same also happened with Microsoft Edge. And, when returning to Brave, it now worked with the YubiKey without any fuss at all.
It seems like the only issue that Discourse has is with the initial communication with the key (or, rather, whatever enables the key to be ‘visible’ to the browser) in Chromium-based browsers. Once that key is assigned to Discourse, it will easily be accepted by any other browser. I didn’t try it out on Safari for iOS (YubiKey 5 NFC definitely works with it as well), but I seriously suspect that it won’t have any issues there, either.
Now I’ll have to go back to those many Discourse setups I had joined without success and see if they work now! 