SSO between two Discourse instances

[LSD2020]

I have two instances of Discourse. One will be gaining traffic early and another will be setup as a more general instance that will mature better. I’d like early members who join the first instance to not be hassled with signing up again for the second, longer-lasting instance.

Is this general guide still the way to go?

Use Discourse as an identity provider (SSO, DiscourseConnect)

So you want to use Discourse as an identity provider for your own web app? Great! Let’s get started. Enable DiscourseConnect provider setting Under Discourse admin site settings (/admin/site_settings) enable setting enable discourse connect provider and add a secret string to discourse connect provider secrets (used to hash SSO payloads). Implement DiscourseConnect in your web app: Generate a random nonce. Let’s call this value NONCE. Save it temporarily so that you can verify it with the …

Any gotchas using this guide for SSO between two Discourse instances?

I don’t know it makes much of a difference, but the setup is both instances are running on the same server in standalone configuration with reverse proxy and SSL provisioning standing in front of the containers.

Another thought. Would it make more sense to use a 3rd party SSO provider for both instances? That way the longer lasting forum wouldn’t depend on the short-term instance. It could be brought down without issues on the second.

[LSD2020]

I decided on OAuth social logins for both. It was painless enough and offers the most flexibility