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Implementing Social Authentication

When implementing social authentication in your Laravel application, you may face the issue that Herd’s .test domain is not recognized by the social authentication providers. This is because they often require a public top-level domain (TLD) for their callback URLs. Herd does not support changing the .test domain to a public TLD, because that would introduce serious security issues to your machine – but we can work around this.

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Using the fwd.host Webservice

We’ve created a web service that acts as a proxy for your redirects and does not store any data. You can use this service to handle social authentication callbacks by setting your callback URLs to https://fwd.host/http://your-herd-site.test/auth/callback.

This way, the social authentication provider will redirect to fwd.host, which will then forward the request to your Herd site.

You can see the setup in the following screenshot:

The fwd.host service will forward the request to your Herd site, allowing you to handle the social authentication as usual. For security reasons, the redirects are limited to Herd sites with .test domains only, so you cannot use this service to redirect to any other site.