Use the API to find a username based on an email?

dev
1

I’m trying to integrate a Discourse forum into an existing site.

Is it possible via the API to find out what a user’s username is, if all I have is their email?

2 Likes
2

In lieu of a bump, let me describe what I want to do.

On my CMS, I have a bunch of user profiles. On each profile I want to display that user’s activity on Discourse, which I would get via RSS.

For example, my activity on this Discourse is available here:
https://meta.discourse.org/users/alehandrof/activity.rss

To get this URL I need a username, but I don’t have this data at the CMS. All I have is users’ email, which is the same in both the CMS & Discourse. (I’ve made sure of this manually for now, since it’s a small community, but I will be implementing SSO in the near future.)

It’s a PHP CMS and I’ll write a small add-on that pings Discourse with the email and gets a username in return. I will then use the username to form the URL and give it to a plugin that will consume the RSS feed and allow me to output it with my own HTML.

Is there an API endpoint that allows me to find a user’s username through their email?

3

There’s a function to do this in this PHP API: https://github.com/communiteq/discourse-api-php

(The PHP APIs are a bit all over the place. There are some newer forks out there, but I ran into trouble with the one I tried.)

1 Like
4

There is nothing magical here, just do the action in your admin web UI and watch the f12 network console in the browser. Those are the API calls necessary.

5

I don’t follow :frowning:

The API I linked to works by filtering (which I didn’t know what possible) the list of active users by their email. Not sure how I’d trigger this in thew web UI.

function getUsernameByEmail($email)
{
    $users = $this->_getRequest("/admin/users/list/active.json?filter=".urlencode($email));
    foreach($users->apiresult as $user) {
        if($user->email === $email) {
            return $user->username;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

BTW, let me clarify something in my previous response: I did get the API I linked to to work just fine. I just had trouble with other forks of it.

One thing I’d like to update during SSO is the user’s website field. I tried changing it in the admin to see what happens in the Network tab, but I don’t understand what I’m looking for. (AFAICT, I can’t add the website to the SSO payload, but I should be able to add another step that changes the website right before submitting the payload.)

6

Per:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/06365023c4f215bb6867efe7e41bf740c919586b

If you are searching by email use:

SITENAME.com/admin/users/list/all.json?email=some@email.com

Using filter is inefficient and not recommended for this use case!

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7

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