PHP-Laravel Quickstart for Twilio Authy Two-factor Authentication

Adding two-factor authentication to your application is the easiest way to increase security and trust in your product without unnecessarily burdening your users. This quickstart guides you through building a PHP, Laravel and AngularJS application that restricts access to a URL. Four Authy two-factor authentication channels are demoed: SMS, Voice, Soft Tokens and Push Notifications.

Ready to protect your toy app's users from nefarious balaclava wearing hackers? Dive in!

Sign Into - or Sign Up For - a Twilio Account

Create a new Twilio account (you can sign up for a free Twilio trial), or sign into an existing Twilio account.

Create a new Authy application

Once logged in, visit the Authy Console. Click on the red 'Create New Aplication' (or big red plus ('+') if you already created one) to create a new Authy application then name it something memorable.

You'll automatically be transported to the Settings page next. Click the eyeball icon to reveal your Production API Key.

Copy your Production API Key to a safe place, you will use it during application setup.

Setup Authy on your device

This Authy two-factor authentication quickstart demos two channels which require an installed Authy Client to test: Soft Tokens and Push Notifications. While SMS and Voice channels will work without the client, to try out all four authentication channels download and install Authy Client for Desktop or Mobile:

• Download Authy Client

Install the application prerequisites

To complete the quickstart today we'll use PHP 7.0+, Composer, MySQL, and the Twilio PHP Helper Library. Let's walk through installation below. Skip ahead if you have already installed one.

Install Composer

When doing PHP web development, we strongly suggest using Composer for package management. This quickstart relies on Composer to install the Twilio PHP Helper library. You can find manual installation instructions on the PHP Helper Library page.

• Install Composer for Mac OSX, Linux, or Unix
• Install Composer for Windows

Install MySQL

You'll need a database for storing Authy IDs when a user registers in this quickstart. For this demo, we built our user database on top of MySQL 5.x.

If you haven't yet installed MySQL, here are instructions for your platform:

• Mac OSX
  • Or, use Homebrew
• Linux
• Windows

When installed, start it. If you're using the default MySQL credentials (as below), create schema account_security with an admin user homestead and password secret.

Clone and Setup the Application

Clone our PHP repository locally, then enter the directory.

git clone git@github.com:TwilioDevEd/account-security-quickstart-php.git
cd account-security-quickstart-php
composer install

Edit the dotenv File

cp .env.example .env

Next, copy your Authy API Key from the Authy Dashboard and set the API_KEY variable in your .env file.

Once you have added your API Key, you are ready to run! Launch the app with:

php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate
php artisan serve --port 8081

You should get a message your new app is running!

Try the PHP Authy Two-Factor Demo

With your phone (optionally with the Authy client installed) nearby, open a new browser tab and navigate to http://localhost:8081/register/index.html

Enter your information and invent a password, then hit 'Register'. Your information is passed to Twilio (you will be able to see your user immediately in the console), and the application is returned a user_id.

Now visit http://localhost:8081/login/index.html and login. You'll be presented with a happy screen:

If your phone has the Authy Client installed, you can immediately enter a Soft Token from the client to Verify. Additionally, you can try a Push Notification simply by pushing the labeled button.

If you do not have the Authy Client installed, the SMS and Voice channels will also work in providing a token. To try different channels, you can logout to start the process again.

And there you go, Authy two-factor authentication is on and your PHP/Laravel app is protected!

What's Next?

Now that you are keeping the hackers out of this demo app using Authy two-factor authentication, you can find all of the detailed descriptions for options and API calls in our Two-factor Authentication API Reference. If you're also building a registration flow, also check out our Phone Verification product and the Verify Quickstart which uses this codebase.

For additional guides and tutorials on account security and other products, in PHP and in our other languages, take a look at the Docs.