如何在用户点击其电子邮件中的某个链接时登录我的Web应用程序

Question

Every day I need to send emails to my users with links for articles that they may be interested in on my news site. Example of link: <a href="http://example.com/article/5/some-seo-title>title of article </a>

I am keeping data about users in my user table: id, username, email ...

When user clicks some link in the mail I've sent to him, i want him to get automatically logged in.

What has to be done in order to achieve this ? I am not asking for complete code, but more for a guide about general steps that has to be done, and maybe some code samples, you don't have to code everything...

I am using, php, mysql, yii2, bootstrap 3

Thanks

Answer 1

I'd probably recommend login tokens (preferably one-time use only) generated when you create the link created as a long hash (see sha256/sha512/GUIDs). You could (and should) also add validity dates to those tokens if need-be to ensure that someone doesn't reuse them and invalidate them on login or logout from that session. Since you might have multiple tokens, have a list of valid ones for each user though implementation depends on db type and/or normalization levels.