# Discourse ## Backend class For Django, add this class path to `AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS`. For other integrations, use the same class path in the framework-specific backend setting. | Backend name | Class path | |----------------|------------------------------------------------| | `discourse` | `social_core.backends.discourse.DiscourseAuth` | Discourse can serve as a Single Sign On provider for Authentication. The backend binds the local association to Discourse’s `external_id`. Email addresses remain profile data and are not account identifiers because they can change or later belong to another user. - Deploy a Discourse application and configure the application to enable Discourse as an SSO provider. - Fill in the shared secret and url of the Discourse server in the settings: ```default SOCIAL_AUTH_DISCOURSE_SECRET = "myDiscourseSecret" SOCIAL_AUTH_DISCOURSE_SERVER_URL = "https://my-discourse-site.com" ``` ## Using multiple Discourse instances Since Discourse is a distributed application, multiple Discourse instances can be used as SSO providers. If this is the case, the DiscourseAuth class can be extended and configured as follows: ```default from social_core.backends.discourse import DiscourseAuth class DiscourseAuthFoo(DiscourseAuth): name = 'discourse-foo' class DiscourseAuthBar(DiscourseAuth): name = 'discourse-bar' ``` Fill in the settings like so: ```default SOCIAL_AUTH_DISCOURSE_FOO_SECRET = "myDiscourseFooSecret" SOCIAL_AUTH_DISCOURSE_FOO_SERVER_URL = "https://my-discourse-foo-site.com" SOCIAL_AUTH_DISCOURSE_BAR_SECRET = "myDiscourseBarSecret" SOCIAL_AUTH_DISCOURSE_BAR_SERVER_URL = "https://my-discourse-bar-site.com" ``` ## External memberships See [External groups](../groups.html.md) for opt-in extraction, group-based login restrictions, and local group synchronization. No separate extraction pipeline step is needed.