Cannot sign in with Discourse ID even when email matches 'DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS' environment variable

Product Support

AI-generated summary

haruspex reported an issue with a self-hosted Discourse instance where they could not sign in using their Discourse ID, despite having DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS configured correctly and SMTP disabled. The system returned an “incorrect username, email, or password” error. Although the user could log in to the Meta forum with the same credentials, the authentication flow redirected to the Discourse ID provider without providing specific error details in the production logs. pmusaraj suggested verifying if the user was logged in directly at id.discourse.com. haruspex later resolved the issue, realizing that having an account on the Meta forum does not automatically grant access to the Discourse ID system. After creating a dedicated Discourse ID account, the login process functioned correctly.

1

Title, basically. I have my self hosted discourse instance set up with SMTP disabled the environment variable DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS set properly to my email that I have this Discourse ID set up with, however, when I try and log in, it kicks me back with an incorrect username, email, or password error.

To double check, I copied the email as entered in app.yml and pasted it into the Meta login and used the same password, and it logs in normally there. I am not sure where to look to start troubleshooting this issue, where would be a good place for me to start looking, or what may be going on here since by all accounts, this should all be correct.

found some of the production logs and this is at the end:

Completed 200 OK in 16ms (Views: 11.5ms | ActiveRecord: 0.0ms (0 queries, 0 cached) | GC: 0.0ms)
Started GET "/" for 2600:8801:1220:1500::5968 at 2026-02-16 04:59:41 +0000
Processing by FinishInstallationController#index as HTML
  Rendered layout layouts/finish_installation.html.erb (Duration: 12.6ms | GC: 0.0ms)
Completed 200 OK in 30ms (Views: 13.7ms | ActiveRecord: 0.0ms (0 queries, 0 cached) | GC: 0.0ms)
Started GET "/finish-installation/redirect-discourse-id" for 2600:8801:1220:1500::5968 at 2026-02-16 04:59:42 +0000
Processing by FinishInstallationController#redirect_discourse_id as HTML
Redirected to https://discourse.elusiveenclav.ee/auth/discourse_id?origin=/wizard
Completed 302 Found in 30ms (ActiveRecord: 0.0ms (0 queries, 0 cached) | GC: 0.0ms)
Started GET "/auth/discourse_id?origin=/wizard" for 2600:8801:1220:1500::5968 at 2026-02-16 04:59:42 +0000

Unfortunately, it doesnt seem to provide any info from signing in at the discourse id sign in page.

2

This is a little surprising. When you go directly to id.discourse.com, are you logged in? And if not, can you log in?

3

Time for me to feel incredibly silly. The main ID page kicked me back as well. Turns out: an account on the Meta forum does not equate to an ID login. Whoops! It all works now after making a proper ID account.

Thanks!