You can integrate Talk with any external authentication service that will enable seamless single sign-on for users within your organization. There are a few methods of doing so:

1. Passport Middleware
2. Custom Token Integration

Both methods work, but there are product decisions that will affect the overall choice.

Passport Middleware

You would choose the Passport Middleware route when you are OK using an auth that is triggered from inside Talk that is not connected to an external auth state (you don't use the auth anywhere else now). A great example of this is our talk-plugin-facebook-auth plugin.

Custom Token Integration

You can integrate Talk with any authentication service to enable single sign-on for users. The steps to do that are:

1. Create a service that generates JWT tokens.
2. Push the token into the embed.
3. Implement the tokenUserNotFound hook to process the token.

Create JWT Token

You should create an external service that is responsible for generating a JWT for use with Talk. The token can be generated as easy as checking out the following node app: https://github.com/coralproject/talk-token-example

Using that demo application, you'll see how you can:

1. Create a node application that can issue JWT's that are compatible with Talk.
2. Provide a validation endpoint that can be used by Talk to validate the token and get the user via the tokenUserNotFound hook.

It's also important to note a few requirements for proper integration with Talk. The generated JWT must contain the following claims:

• jti: a unique identifier for the token (like a uuid/v4)
• exp: the expiry date of the token as a unix timestamp
• sub: the user identifier that can be used to lookup the user in the mongo database
• The user may not yet exist in the database, but that's the responsibility of the tokenUserNotFound hook.
• iss: the issuer for the token must match the value of TALK_JWT_ISSUER
• aud: the audience for the token must match the value of TALK_JWT_AUDIENCE

Push token into embed

We're assuming that your CMS is capable of authenticating a user account, or at least having the user's details available to send off to the token creation service we created/used in the previous step.

Using the token that was created for the user, you simply have to amend the template where Talk is rendering to read as the following:

Coral.Talk.render(document.getElementById('coralStreamEmbed'), {
    // ...
    auth_token: '<your generated JWT token issued for this user>',
});

Which will pass down the token to Talk and will fire the next steps tokenUserNotFound hook to complete the auth flow.

Implement tokenUserNotFound

This is the only piece of code you'll have to write that lives inside Talk. The role of this code is to live as a plugin and provide Talk with a way of taking the token that you gave it, and turning into a user.

Using the example application we were working with in the JWT issuing step above, we'll need to ensure that the configuration is consistent in-between both Talk and the JWT issuer. Namely, the following environment variables from our example issuer and Talk must match:

Talk	Token Issuer Example
TALK_JWT_ISSUER	JWT_ISSUER
TALK_JWT_AUDIENCE	JWT_AUDIENCE
TALK_JWT_SECRET	JWT_SECRET*

* Note that secrets is a pretty complex topic, refer to the TALK_JWT_SECRET configuration reference, the basic takeaway is that the secret used to sign the tokens issued by the issuer must be able to be verified by Talk.

For an example of implementing the plugin, refer to tokenUserNotFound reference.