Automattic

Manzoor Wani

Gergely J

<p>Sign in with Telegram lets your visitors log in with their Telegram account — no extra password to remember, no new account to create. Unlike older Telegram-login plugins that rely on a script embedded from Telegram (which modern privacy-focused browsers often block), this plugin uses <a href="https://core.telegram.org/bots/telegram-login" rel="nofollow ugc">Telegram’s standard OpenID Connect login</a>: a secure redirect to Telegram and back. It works reliably in every browser, including ones with strict tracker blocking turned on.</p>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>“Sign in with Telegram” button</strong> on the standard <code>wp-login.php</code> screen, as a <code>[telegram_signin_button]</code> shortcode anywhere on your site, or as a Block Editor block.</li>
<li><strong>Account linking</strong> from the user profile screen — existing WordPress users can connect or disconnect their Telegram account.</li>
<li><strong>Profile sync</strong> — display name and avatar from the user’s Telegram profile flow through to the WordPress profile automatically.</li>
<li><strong>No automatic account merging</strong> — a Telegram identity can only attach to an existing WordPress user through an explicit click-to-link action from a logged-in session, so a stranger who happens to share an email address can never take over an account.</li>
<li><strong>Secure by default</strong> — uses the same kind of modern, signed redirect flow that “Sign in with Google” and “Sign in with Apple” use. No shared bot-token secret on your server, no manual key rotation.</li>
<li><strong>Settings page</strong> in wp-admin where you paste the bot’s Client ID + Client Secret, pick the default role for new users, and optionally collect the visitor’s verified phone number or request permission for your bot to message them directly.</li>
</ul>
<h4>How it compares to the legacy Login Widget</h4>
<p>Telegram’s older Login Widget (used by most existing Telegram-login plugins on the directory) is <strong>not</strong> OAuth or OpenID Connect. It loads a JavaScript file from telegram.org that renders Telegram’s button on your page and then hands the auth result either to a JavaScript callback or to a server URL. Either mode still needs the embedded script to render the button in the first place. That setup is increasingly fragile:</p>
<ul>
<li>Browsers with strict third-party-script blocking — Brave with default shields, Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection on Strict, Safari Lockdown Mode, uBlock Origin filter lists — frequently block the embedded script outright, so the button never renders and visitors have no way to start the flow.</li>
<li>The widget’s authentication hash is an HMAC-SHA256 over your bot token, so anyone who wants to verify a login has to hold a copy of that secret. There’s no standard JWT / JWKS story to lean on.</li>
<li>Key rotation is manual — changing the HMAC key means rotating the bot token in BotFather and updating it on every server that verifies logins.</li>
</ul>
<p>Sign in with Telegram uses Telegram’s newer OpenID Connect provider instead — a standard server-side redirect flow with a properly signed RS256 <code>id_token</code>. No third-party scripts on your pages, no shared bot-token secret with verifiers, automatic key rotation via JWKS. It behaves the same regardless of how privacy-locked-down the visitor’s browser is.</p>
<h3>External services</h3>
<p>This plugin connects to Telegram’s OpenID Connect provider at <code>oauth.telegram.org</code> so visitors can sign in with their Telegram account. No data is sent to Telegram unless a visitor actively starts a sign-in.</p>
<p>What is sent, and when:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Sign-in start.</strong> When a visitor clicks the “Sign in with Telegram” button, their browser is redirected to <code>oauth.telegram.org</code> with the bot’s Client ID, the requested scopes (always <code>openid</code> and <code>profile</code>; additionally <code>phone</code> and / or <code>telegram:bot_access</code> if you enabled those in <strong>Settings <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Sign in with Telegram</strong>), a random <code>state</code>, a random <code>nonce</code>, and a PKCE <code>code_challenge</code> (SHA-256). The only user-specific traffic at this step is the browser redirect itself. If the discovery cache is cold (see below), building the redirect URL also triggers an anonymous server-side GET of the discovery document — no user data in that request.</li>
<li><strong>Sign-in callback.</strong> After the visitor approves the sign-in on Telegram’s side, Telegram redirects them back to your site with an authorization <code>code</code>. The plugin then makes a single server-to-server POST to Telegram’s token endpoint, sending the Client ID + Client Secret (as HTTP Basic auth), the <code>code</code>, the matching PKCE <code>code_verifier</code>, and the redirect URI. Telegram responds with a signed <code>id_token</code> containing the visitor’s Telegram identifier, name, profile picture URL, and (if the <code>phone</code> scope was granted) phone number.</li>
<li><strong>Discovery + JWKS lookup.</strong> The first sign-in after activation (and again after the local cache expires, 12 hours) triggers a one-off, anonymous GET to Telegram’s OpenID Connect discovery document and JSON Web Key Set (JWKS) at <code>oauth.telegram.org</code>. Both responses are cached in WordPress transients. If a later <code>id_token</code> references a signing key that isn’t in the cache (Telegram rotated keys), the JWKS is re-fetched once; a short cooldown prevents repeated refresh attempts. No user data is sent in any of these requests.</li>
</ul>
<p>This service is provided by Telegram. Refer to Telegram’s <a href="https://telegram.org/tos" rel="nofollow ugc">Terms of Service</a> and <a href="https://telegram.org/privacy" rel="nofollow ugc">Privacy Policy</a> for details on how Telegram handles the sign-in.</p>


Sign in with Telegram

Add Telegram login to your WordPress site. Visitors sign in with their existing Telegram account — no new password to remember.

WordPress.org

Alex Kirk

Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)

Paulo Pinto

<p>With this plugin you can use your own WordPress install to authenticate with a webservice that provides <a href="https://openid.net/connect/" rel="nofollow ugc">OpenID Connect</a> to implement Single-Sign On (SSO) for your users.</p>
<p>The plugin is currently only configured using constants and hooks as follows:</p>
<h3>Define the RSA keys</h3>
<p>If you don’t have keys that you want to use yet, generate them using these commands:</p>
<pre><code>openssl genrsa -out oidc.key 4096
openssl rsa -in oidc.key -pubout -out public.key
</code></pre>
<p>And make them available to the plugin as follows (this needs to be added before WordPress loads):</p>
<pre><code>define( 'OIDC_PUBLIC_KEY', <<<OIDC_PUBLIC_KEY
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
...
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----
OIDC_PUBLIC_KEY
);

define( 'OIDC_PRIVATE_KEY', <<<OIDC_PRIVATE_KEY
-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
...
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----
OIDC_PRIVATE_KEY
);
</code></pre>
<p>Alternatively, you can also put them outside the webroot and load them from the files like this:</p>
<pre><code>define( 'OIDC_PUBLIC_KEY', file_get_contents( '/web-inaccessible/oidc.key' ) );
define( 'OIDC_PRIVATE_KEY', file_get_contents( '/web-inaccessible/private.key' ) );
</code></pre>
<h3>Define the clients</h3>
<p>Define your clients by adding a filter to <code>oidc_registered_clients</code> in a separate plugin file or <code>functions.php</code> of your theme or in a MU-plugin like:</p>
<pre><code>add_filter( 'oidc_registered_clients', 'my_oidc_clients' );
function my_oidc_clients() {
    return array(
        'client_id_random_string' => array(
            'name' => 'The name of the Client',
            'secret' => 'a secret string',
            'redirect_uri' => 'https://example.com/redirect.uri',
            'grant_types' => array( 'authorization_code' ),
            'scope' => 'openid profile',
        ),
    );
}
</code></pre>
<h3>Exclude URL from caching</h3>
<ul>
<li><code>example.com/wp-json/openid-connect/userinfo</code>: We implement caching exclusion measures for this endpoint by setting <code>Cache-Control: 'no-cache'</code> headers and defining the <code>DONOTCACHEPAGE</code> constant. If you have a unique caching configuration, please ensure that you manually exclude this URL from caching.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Github Repo</h3>
<p>You can report any issues you encounter directly on <a href="https://github.com/Automattic/wp-openid-connect-server" rel="nofollow ugc">Github repo: Automattic/wp-openid-connect-server</a></p>


OpenID Connect Server

Use OpenID Connect to log in to other webservices using your own WordPress.

Sign in with Telegram vs OpenID Connect Server