Use Jetpack Connection to authenticate

[DanReyLop]

Fixes #111

Quick & dirty try branch, let's not merge it by accident :)

Setup:

• Deactivate Jetpack in your site (don't uninstall it, I think that clears the tokens).
• Go to your wp-content/plugins folder and delete the jetpack folder. You can also just move it to someplace else.
• Clone the Jetpack repo on a completely different path in your machine (or move the jetpack folder there), update it to the try/connection-package-fix branch.
• Update WCPay to this branch.
• Edit line 39 on composer.json so it points to the path where you cloned jetpack.
• Run composer install, it will say that it created a bunch of symlinks to the jetpack/packages/[...] folders.
• Run npm run watch.
• Go to the Payments section on WP-Admin, you should see a list of transactions correctly fetched all the way from WPCOM :)

See Automattic/jetpack@ca4cdd5 for the changes I had to make in jetpack just to make it work. I based that commit off the Automattic/jetpack#12699 PR.

This just works if there's already a Jetpack token in the database, so it will only work if you had the full fat Jetpack plugin correctly connected and you deactivated it as said in the instructions.

Sometimes, the Connection package would just work if jetpack the plugin was deactivated but still in wp-content/plugins, because the code would still be there. That's why I recommend you completely remove it, to eliminate false positives.

Communication from WPCOM to the site doesn't work, so forget about managing your WCPay site from Calypso.

Edit: I based this branch off add/link-to-order-in-transaction because right now there's no place in master to test that a connection works as easily as this: just go to the transactions list, see if it loads a bunch of data, you're done. Now the list transactions code is in master, so I rebased this branch.

cc/ @zinigor @marcinbot @v18 @allendav @RadoslavGeorgiev

[DanReyLop]

Obviously this won't be needed when automattic/jetpack-* packages are published. There's a way to tell composer to resolve a package from a GitHub repo, but it doesn't work with monorepos like jetpack/jetpack.

[DanReyLop]

@zinigor How is the jetpack-constants package supposed to be used? I would expect that the package itself would define the JETPACK_MASTER_USER constant (and other constants), but it doesn't (yet).

[DanReyLop]

Nevermind, I see that the Connection\Manager class has the JETPACK_MASTER_USER constant.

[DanReyLop]

But it would still be a problem if we wanted to use this method for example:
https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/blob/ca4cdd56658a0028374d180c2fb8d3eb695e5a28/packages/connection/src/Client.php#L388

[allendav]

@DanReyLop wrote:

so it will only work if you had the full fat Jetpack plugin correctly connected and you deactivated it as said in the instructions.

Is this still true? Does @zinigor know?

cc @marcinbot - let's clarify what sort of URL or ajax call we'd like for connecting / disconnecting

[DanReyLop]

Is this still true?

Honestly I haven't tried, but by looking at the jetpack-connection code, I don't see how it could work. There's a Manager::register() function to call, but there's no UI, and nothing that may redirect the user to wp.com.

[zinigor]

Sorry, I was AFK, couldn't reply earlier. Yes, this is still true AFAIK: currently the connection package expects the plugin that uses it to do most of the legwork. Plus there's no corresponding connection flow in WordPress.com yet.

[marcinbot]

Yes, this is still true AFAIK: currently the connection package expects the plugin that uses it to do most of the legwork

@zinigor Could you clarify what is the expected legwork? Is there maybe a P2 that summarizes it? Which parts of Jetpack would we have to implement ourselves?

We'd like to have a flow similar if not the same as Jetpack (subject to woo design). If Connect was able to provide this, we'd be happy for now.

[zinigor]

@marcinbot the main thing the plugin currently needs to do is:

• bundle the dependency,
• add all the required hooks,
• and manually call the register method.

This all you can see in the last three commits to the client-example repo: https://github.com/Automattic/client-example/commits/master

Following these steps will make sure that your site has a blog token and a client ID, everything else is still not ready - user authentication part where the user logs in to WordPress.com and accepts the ToS is the biggest chunk of what still needs to be done.