What's the exact difference between 'manual' user and 'oauth' user

What's the exact difference between 'manual' user and 'oauth' user

by Brian Jeong -
Number of replies: 1

We have our own OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server.

mywuv oauth2



And it works fine.
Users who can login to our student portal can login to our moodle site too by clicking the continue button:

login with mywuv


We create moodle users through our school management system using moodle web service 'core_user_create_users'
and their 'auth' field is 'manual' when it's available to users.

And they are categorized as 'manual accounts' in 'Manage Authentication' settings.

manage authentication


I can change the field in User Profile if I want.

edit user profile auth method

I was like, "We create these users by moodle webservice core_user_create_users by admin account, so is it 'manual' ? or... They log in to the moodle site using OAuth2, so is it 'oauth 2' ?  or... They both work for our OAuth2 server anyway, so it doesn't matter?

I want to know the exact definitions of "Manual Account User" and "OAuth 2 User"  so I can decide which value is right for "Choose an authentication method" in editing user profile even tho our OAuth2 server is working fine with current settings as manual users.

Can anybody shed some light on this? Thanks!


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In reply to Brian Jeong

Re: What's the exact difference between 'manual' user and 'oauth' user

by Leon Stringer -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

Some auth plugins will authenticate users with different auth methods. For example auth_saml2 will authenticate users with other methods which means you can populate users in Moodle with, say, LDAP but still use SAML2 for SSO which is useful as you can't populate users with SAML2.

As far as I can see the only difference between "Manual accounts" and "OAuth 2" when using OAuth 2 authentication is that if the user is set as "OAuth 2" then changes to the user on the OAuth 2 server (e.g. first name, last name) will be updated in Moodle. If the user is manual then they won't be updated.

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