Hi there. One of my clients wants to enable well-known authentication methods on her Discourse, in order to reduce the brakes and frictions for new users to sign-in (no need to create a new account).
Google ID works out of the box and I’m trying to figure out the possibilities with Microsoft and Meta.
Both tutorials lack the one crucial question for businesses, which is: “do we have to pay at some point or not?”
- With a free Microsoft account, new app subscription is currently not available unless you have an Azure or 365 Developers Program subscription. Azure looks free while you don’t buy anything, but sign-up does ask for credit card details, so I’m unsure and I don’t want my client to be debited without warning.
- Meta tutorial is simply outdated so I left a message on the topic.
I know this is not Discourse support per se, but I hope someone will be able to provide recent intel or a better heuristic to figure it all out.
Thanks!
Yeah supporting Microsoft for login seems rather convoluted!
I’ve just walked through it and we’ll have to update our documentation. It does require a free Azure account as you noted.
You then have to register a new application in Microsoft Entra ID. This required a credit card as you mentioned. I was able to configure this and get it working for login and have not been charged (be sure to select the web option instead of single-page application). There are subscription plans for Microsoft Entra but you do not appear to need those.
For Facebook, you need to go to https://developers.facebook.com/async/registration — I hit a wall on this because it’s requiring me to have a Facebook account older than 1 hour to continue. So I can come back to it.
Update: made it through the Facebook flow but couldn’t activate login without “verifying as a business”, which requires uploading documentation. I’m not going to do that, so I can’t complete the process.
Neither option seems to require payment.