Identity at Mozilla

Home of the Mozilla Identity team

  1. Application and Platform Integration of Persona

    Sep 6, 2012 — by callahad

    We are happy to see Persona gaining traction in the developer community, with dozens of sites and services integrating Persona to simplify and speed up the login process while simultaneously eliminating site-specific passwords for users. Some recent Persona adopters include:

    • LoginRadius, an embeddable authentication widget, permits quick integration of Persona and other authentication systems within many platforms, languages, and frameworks. We’re excited to see Persona amongst their login offerings, giving their partners a new, simple way to authenticate users.
    • Mahara, an open source e-portfolio system used by educational institutions around the world, has implemented Persona as an authentication system to allow users to log in to their portfolios and collaborate with others in groups on projects. Persona is included by default as of version 1.5 which was released in April 2012.
    • Koha, a popular integrated library system, is planning to include Persona as one of the default login mechanisms as of version 3.12. With this integration, both librarians and visitors will be able to access library resources using Persona.
    • The Eclipse Foundation is building Persona into the 1.0 release of Orion, an IDE that runs as a web application. By logging in with Persona, users will be able to organize projects and collaboratively develop software from the comfort of their browser.

    For Ruby developers, OmniAuth offers a Persona module courtesy of Intridea. It’s available on GitHub at https://github.com/intridea/omniauth-browserid.

    Similarly, Node.js developers can leverage Persona thanks to a Passport module from Jared Hanson of Helixent Technologies. The module is available on GitHub at https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-browserid.

    Lastly, a groundswell of community support has helped produce many more libraries and plugins, which you can find on our GitHub Wiki. If you’re curious about Mozilla’s own use of Persona, we’ll blog about that shortly. Until then, check out the django-browserid library — it already handles the authentication on sites like MDN.

    If you’re considering adding Persona to your application or website, you can find documentation on MDN. Don’t forget to keep in touch via our mailing list or by tweeting with the #mozPersona hash-tag.