PHP Firebase help - Set up JWT

Question

On my server I am running a few PHP files that read my Firebase Realtime Database. According to Firebase's documents I need to set up custom token to get my Firebase PHP Client running. The Firebase document says I need to return this;

  return JWT::encode($payload, $private_key, "RS256");

How exactly do I reference the JWT class? I downloaded a JWT library but I am not sure how to implement this into my project. Any help would be great, I am mainly a mobile developer and have little experience with PHP.

Solution

firebase/php-jwt library uses Composer. Composer is a dependency manager for PHP similar to Maven in Java if you come from Android development background. You would need to know how to import classes in PHP using require/include functions of PHP. You would need some experience with php to use composer.

In order to use firebase/php-jwt library without composer you could use the following sample code: (I downloaded the library inside jwt folder)

require_once 'jwt/src/BeforeValidException.php';
require_once 'jwt/src/ExpiredException.php';
require_once 'jwt/src/SignatureInvalidException.php';
require_once 'jwt/src/JWT.php';


use \Firebase\JWT\JWT;

$key = "example_key";
$token = array(
   "iss" => "http://example.org",
   "aud" => "http://example.com",
   "iat" => 1356999524,
   "nbf" => 1357000000
);

/**
 * IMPORTANT:
 * You must specify supported algorithms for your application. See
 * https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-jose-json-web-algorithms-40
 * for a list of spec-compliant algorithms.
*/
$jwt = JWT::encode($token, $key);
$decoded = JWT::decode($jwt, $key, array('HS256'));

print_r($decoded);

/*
 NOTE: This will now be an object instead of an associative array. To get
 an associative array, you will need to cast it as such:
*/

$decoded_array = (array) $decoded;

/**
* You can add a leeway to account for when there is a clock skew times   between
* the signing and verifying servers. It is recommended that this leeway should
* not be bigger than a few minutes.
*
* Source: http://self-issued.info/docs/draft-ietf-oauth-json-web-token.html#nbfDef
*/
   JWT::$leeway = 60; // $leeway in seconds
   $decoded = JWT::decode($jwt, $key, array('HS256'));