Customizing authentication and response

Yii allows us to quickly create a custom authentication method for our application. This is useful because in some cases, the previously mentioned authentications are not sufficient.

A custom authentication model can be made by extending the yii\filters\auth\AuthMethod class, which implements yii\filters\auth\AuthInterface that requires overriding the authenticate ($user, $request, and $response) method:

<?php

namespace api\components;

use yii\filters\auth\AuthMethod;
use Yii;

class CustomAuthMethod extends AuthMethod {

    public function authenticate($user, $request, $response) {
    …
    …
    …
}
…
…
…
}

Even though the REST API should be stateless, or rather should not save session data, it could be necessary to store some information or preferences during a session across requests.

So, if we need to support a session, we can start it through the authenticate() method called in the beforeAction()...