Preventing automatic sign-in when using Google+ Sign-In

lamplightdev picture lamplightdev · Mar 18, 2013 · Viewed 24.9k times · Source

I am in the process of integrating Google+ sign in with my site, which also lets users sign in with Twitter and Facebook. The sign in page of the site therefore has 3 buttons, one for each of the services.

The issue I am having is in the following scenario:

  • user goes to the sign in page
  • user signs in successfully with G+
  • user signs out of my site (but the account is still associated with G+, signing out of the site does not disconnect the G+ account)
  • user visits the sign in page again
  • at this stage the Sign in with G+ button is rendered and automatically signs the user into the account associated with G+ without the user having to click the button

The problem is that on revisiting the sign in page, I want the user to have the option of signing in with another service, rather than automatically being signed in with G+. If the user wants to sign in with G+ then they can do so by clicking the button - the user will then be signed in automatically.

Is it possible to prevent this automatic sign in on button render? I can simulate it by using the data-approvalprompt="force" as an attribute on the button, but I don't think this is an ideal solution (the user then has to go through the confirmation process, which I would ideally would like to prevent)

Answer

class picture class · Mar 19, 2013

Update

The best supported way to prevent automatic sign-in is to use the API method gapi.auth2.getAuthInstance().signOut() which will prevent automatic sign-in on your site after it has been called. Demo here.

In the demo, the user is signed out when they leave the page as shown in the following code:

window.onbeforeunload = function(e){
  gapi.auth2.getAuthInstance().signOut();
};

Now, whenever the user exits the site (e.g. closes the window, navigates away), they will be signed out and the sign in button will not trigger sign-in until the user clicks it.

I don't recommend you do this in your own implementation but instead allow the user to explicitly sign out when they no longer desire want to be signed in. Also, please note that my example is a demo, you probably do not want to sign the user out automatically any time they leave your site.

Original Post

First, you should not be using data-approvalprompt="force" as this will cause extra authorized subtokens to be issued to your application / client and is designed to be used in scenarios where the user needs to be reauthorized after credentials have been lost server-side.

Second, you probably do not want to have the behavior where the user needs to click to sign in because they are already "signed in" to their Google account and it could be confusing to need to sign in (or trigger sign-in) again, separately, for your site.

If you really wanted to do this, you would perform an explicit render for the signin button but would not make the call to gapi.signin.render as documented in the Google+ sign-in documentation until you are aware that the user will not automatically get signed in.

The following code shows how to enable explicit render of the sign-in button:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js">
{"parsetags": "explicit"}
</script>
<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
var token = "";
function onSigninCallbackVanilla(authResponse){
   // in a typical flow, you show disconnect here and hide the sign-in button
}

The following code shows you how to explicitly render the button:

  <span id="signinButton">
    <button id = "shim" onclick="gapi.signin.go(); $('#shim').hide();">Show the button</button>
    <span
      class="g-signin"
      data-callback="onSigninCallbackVanilla"
      data-clientid="YOUR_CLIENT_ID"
      data-cookiepolicy="single_host_origin"
      data-requestvisibleactions="http://schemas.google.com/AddActivity"
      data-scope="https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.login">

    </span>
  </span>  

How you're communicating that the user is signed out of your site is probably going to vary from site to site, but one approach could be to set a cookie indicating the "signed out" state for a user and then using this as the trigger for blocking explicit load. The behavior gets a little trickier when a user visits your site and has disabled cookies or uses a separate, signed-in, browser. To address this, you could do something complicated like querying the user state from your server over XHR on the sign-in callback and pretending not to know the user is signed in to Google+.