How to Use multiple User Providers

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Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 7.2 (the current stable version).

Note

It's always better to use a specific user provider for each authentication mechanism. Chaining user providers should be avoided in most applications and used only to solve edge cases.

Each authentication mechanism (e.g. HTTP Authentication, form login, etc) uses exactly one user provider, and will use the first declared user provider by default. But what if you want to specify a few users via configuration and the rest of your users in the database? This is possible by creating a new provider that chains the two together:

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# app/config/security.yml
security:
    providers:
        users:
            chain:
                providers: [users_in_memory, users_in_db]
        users_in_memory:
            memory:
                users:
                    foo: { password: test }
        users_in_db:
            entity: { class: AppBundle\Entity\User, property: username }

Now, all firewalls that explicitly define users as their user provider will, in turn, try to load the user from both the users_in_memory then users_in_db providers.

3.4

In previous Symfony versions, firewalls that didn't define their user provider explicitly, used the first existing provider (users in this example). However, auto-selecting the first user provider has been deprecated in Symfony 3.4 and will throw an exception in 4.0. Always define the provider used by the firewall when there are multiple providers.

You can also configure the firewall or individual authentication mechanisms to use a specific provider. Again, unless a provider is specified explicitly, the first provider is always used:

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# app/config/security.yml
security:
    firewalls:
        secured_area:
            # ...
            pattern: ^/
            provider: users_in_db
            http_basic:
                realm: 'Secured Demo Area'
                provider: users_in_memory
            form_login: ~

In this example, if a user tries to log in via HTTP authentication, the authentication system will use the users_in_memory user provider. But if the user tries to log in via the form login, the users_in_db provider will be used (since it's the default for the firewall as a whole).

If you need to check that the user being returned by your provider is a allowed to authenticate, check the returned user object:

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use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\User;
// ...

public function loadUserByUsername($username)
{
    // ...

    // you can, for example, test that the returned user is an object of a
    // particular class or check for certain attributes of your user objects
    if ($user instance User) {
        // the user was loaded from the main security config file. Do something.
        // ...
    }

    return $user;
}

For more information about user provider and firewall configuration, see the Security Configuration Reference (SecurityBundle).

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
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