Authenticate in PHP with OS username/password?

Question

I'm wondering if there's a way to use PHP (or perhaps some other CGI, but preferably PHP) to authenticate a user with their OS (in this case, Linux, Debian 5) username and password. Possible? Difficult? Thanks!

Answer 1

The only way to do this would be to execute some sort of login using the php exec() command.

I am not a sysadmin so I don't know what the command would be, but if you can find a login command, you can use PHP to pass that command and then parse the results.

Answer 2

Generally this kind of stuff is OS-specific and hooks into existing authentication procedures. For Linux, you might want to check out PAM... There is a PECL module for PAM which could help you accomplish this. I imagine you have to configure PAM to allow this type of authentication, so it could require some system administrative work.

Answer 3

If you mean with their login credentials on the Server it depends on how the authentication is handled, (mostly with one of the PAM backends)

then the easiest way would be to use http://pecl.php.net/package/PAM