Disable account confirm emails when creating users via API

@team

Continuing the discussion from Disable Welcome Emails - Can it be done?:

Hello. I’ve tried disabling these in a bunch of ways:

I’ve tried both choices for “discourse narrative bot welcome post type”, and the email sends no matter what.

I’ve also tried doing this:

The email is still being sent. How do I stop it?

Having a similar problem with the “Confirm your new account” email – the PM from discobot is turned off, but users are still receiving the email. It looks like these are different settings. Is there a way to remove the confirmation email?

For clarification, are you adding users via the API @jeffbrowning?

Correct. This is an API call. The data is:

data = {
        'api_key': settings.DISCOURSE_API_KEY,
        'api_username': settings.DISCOURSE_API_USERNAME,
        'name': 'foobar',
        'email':email,
        'password': password,
        'username': 'barbaz',
        'active': True,
        'approved': True
    }

I first tried just sending this API call:
first_res = requests.post('{base}/users.json'.format(base=settings.DISCOURSE_BASE_URL), data

When I did this, my users were not active (despite the active: True in the data above).
I then tried to activate them via the api:

data = {
        'api_key': settings.DISCOURSE_API_KEY,
        'api_username': settings.DISCOURSE_API_USERNAME,
    }
    requests.put('{base}/admin/users/{id}/activate'.format(
        base=settings.DISCOURSE_BASE_URL,
        id=json_response_content['user_id']
    ), data)

When I did this, the users were active, but the activation email was still being sent. I read here (Creating Active Users via the API gem) That I should try deactivating the user and then activating, so I tried that as well:

data = {
        'api_key': settings.DISCOURSE_API_KEY,
        'api_username': settings.DISCOURSE_API_USERNAME,
    }
    requests.put('{base}/admin/users/{id}/deactivate'.format(
        base=settings.DISCOURSE_BASE_URL,
        id=json_response_content['user_id']
    ), data)
    requests.put('{base}/admin/users/{id}/activate'.format(
        base=settings.DISCOURSE_BASE_URL,
        id=json_response_content['user_id']
    ), data)

I could not see any difference in behavior between this code and the previous version (creating the user, and then activating).

Per:

You can now specify that an account is also approved on creation, previously it was beyond cumbersome.

You should use active: 'true' , upper case true will not work.

As long as the API key is associated with an admin you can now create approved, active accounts via the API with no emails.

We will deploy this to our standard tier later this week.

6 Likes

Ok we’ll try that. Do we still need to deactivate + activate or can we take that out as well?

Take that out, but wait till Friday or so to test this out, we have a process prior to pushing our standard tier that we need to follow.

1 Like

Is there a security risk here? Can we stipulate these cannot be staff (mod/admin) accounts?

It should be fine, we only whitelist staged, approved and active. Admin/moderator is not in the whitelist

5 Likes

I am still having issues creating user accounts using the API. Here are the params I am passing to create the user

$params = array(
            'name'                  => $user_details['name'],
            'username'              => $user_details['username'],
            'email'                 => $user_details['email'],
            'password'              => $user_details['password'],
            'challenge'             => $api_keys->challenge,
            'password_confirmation' => $api_keys->value,
            'active' => 'true',
            'approved' => 'true',
            );

The user is being successfully create and no email is being sent. But when I try to login using the account created I am getting the following error message.
You can’t log in yet. We previously sent an activation email to you at *@.org. Please follow the instructions in that email to activate your account. Do I have to change any other settings on the admin? Any help is appreciated.

You might try activating the user with a second API call.

@pfaffman The issue that I am facing with that approach is, a confirmation email gets sent out when I create the user without the “active” parameter. Ideally I would want to create and activate an user using the api without sending the confirmation email.

So my idea was to create the user that way and then try to activate the user via a second API call.

Usually the answer to questions like this are to use SSO, but it’s not clear that it’s what you should do.

Unfortunately we cant use SSO.
The issue with creating an user by passing the active flag and then trying to activate is that we cant activate an already activated user.
I was hoping when active =“true” is passed as a parameter to create the user the user account should be created and activated without sending the confirmation email. Looks like the API request is not doing that.

1 Like

That sounds like a bug to me.

My next suggestion would be to create it with active. Then deactivate and reactivate with the API. (Or to submit a PR that fixes the bug.)

Yes, Looks like this is the only method that works. Thanks.

1 Like

Is this working at all?

deactivation and activation also seems not to work properly. I see emails still being sent to pre activated users.

I tried sending API calls setting active=true and approved=true , but get the following response:

{
“success”: true,
“active”: false,
“message”: “You’re almost done! We sent an activation mail to ‘[my email]’. Please follow the instructions in the mail to activate your account.If it doesn’t arrive, check your spam folder.”
}

However, no e-mail is sent and no user seems to be created - at least, I don’t see any in the admin interface. What could be the reason for that?

They might be under the “new” tab instead of the “active” tab?

I’m not exactly sure what your use case is for creating users for the API but I would consider looking into using Single Sign on.

However, these are the current steps you need to perform in order to create a user via the API without sending a confirmation email. You will have to make 3 requests:

  1. Create the user with the active=true param
  2. Deactive the user
  3. Activate the user.
1 Like

Hi Blake, thank you for your response!

No, unfortunately not. I checked that. For some reason, I have the same list of users in the “Active” and “New” tabs, just in a different order.

I am going to migrate from another place (YouTrack, an issue tracker), and would like to make it as smooth and seamless to our users as possible. So my plan was to move all users via API, then move their posts (pull that from the issue tracker and create them in Discourse via API), comments and attachments, and after that send invitations. This is why I need to create users first - to make them the authors of their posts and comments.

Yes, I’ve read that in this topic above. The problem is that for step 2 I need to know the user ID, which is supposed to be in the response to step 1, but it isn’t. Also, the response message to “active=true” should be different, as shown here: Creating Active Users via the API gem - #36 by mikechristopher