Database Users

Overview

If you have a large amount of users, or you need to scale horizontally, it may make sense to store them in a database.

You may choose to store users in a traditional database using the Eloquent driver, or piggybacking on the Stache using the Redis driver.

Eloquent

Installation

In your .env file, add the following variables and customize as necessary:

DB_HOST=localhost
DB_DATABASE=database-name
DB_USERNAME=username
DB_PASSWORD=password

Generate the migration file into site/database/migrations by running the following command:

php please make:user-migration

Modify the migration file as necessary:

• You may optionally separate the name column into first_name and last_name columns.
• If you don’t plan to use OAuth, you can remove the references in the up/down methods.

Modify your site/settings/fieldsets/user.yaml fieldset as necessary:

• Ensure you have the correct name name (or first_name and last_name) field(s) to match your migration.
• Remove the content biography field, unless you’ve specified a matching column in your migration.
• Add validation to require non-nullable fields in your migration.
• etc.

Make sure the database you specified in your .env file exists and run the migration:

php please migrate

Finally, enable the driver in your site/settings/users.yaml file:

driver: eloquent

OAuth

If you chose to separate the name column into first_name and last_name, you should be aware that the default OAuth implementation will try to save a name value to the user and result in an exception.

You will need to customize the user data creation to handle the two columns.

Redis

The Redis user driver assumes you are using Redis as the cache driver.

Installation

Ensure you are using Redis as the cache driver:

CACHE_DRIVER=redis

Enable the driver in your site/settings/users.yaml file:

driver: redis

Persistence

By default, user files will still be saved to disk. This will allow you to track them in source control. Additionally, when your Redis cache is empty, any user files will be read from disk.

If you don’t have a need to track user files, you may disable them being written to disk inside site/settings/users.yaml:

redis_write_file: false

A typical example where you may not care about keeping user files is if you are using OAuth. The users will be re-created on the fly whenever they re-authenticate with the provider.