OpenID from your Launchpad profile
As of today, you can use your Launchpad identity to log into any website that supports OpenID. Now, you need remember only your Launchpad username and password for thousands of websites.
Here’s how it works:
- You visit a website that’s an OpenID receiver and it asks you to log in.
- You give that website your Launchpad profile’s URL – e.g. https://launchpad.net/~fred-bloggs
- Launchpad asks you to confirm that you want to log in to the other website.
- Once you’ve confirmed, you’re logged into the website and can use it just like normal.
That works both for sites that support OpenID 2.0 and 1.1. If you ever need your explicit OpenID URL, that’s no problem: you’ll find it on your profile page just below your contact details.
There’s one thing to bear in mind: once you start using your Launchpad profile to log into OpenID sites you shouldn’t rename your Launchpad account. That’s not to say you can’t change the display name but rather the system name that appears in your Launchpad URLs. In my case, the system name is matthew.revell.
Want to get started and not sure where to find sites that support OpenID? Take a look at the OpenID site’s Where page. There’s more on our OpenID help page.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
That’s cool, but to be honest, I’d prefer Launchpad.net to be an OpenId consumer, instead of a provider.
There are many places where people can get an OpenId, but few where people can actually use it.
Cheers.
November 20th, 2008 at 12:05 am
When will users be able to log into launchpad with an openID from another provider. There are so many openID providers but not enough sites accept openIDs.
—
Steven (Stebalien.com)
November 20th, 2008 at 6:31 am
Any website properly implementing the OpenID spec can handle system name changes. The only thing that is promised not to change is the openid identifier. REVU, which was one of the first sites to link against LP openID explicately catches and appropriately hands the change.
November 20th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Wow, now I could have yet another OpenID. But I still have just one single website where I can use those OpenIDs, which is my own.
Consumer support please.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:10 am
I have to agree with the other comments – it would be really useful to be able to log into launchpad with an external openid account. Is this on the cards?
November 24th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
OpenID consumer support is the only thing we need. There is absolutely no need for another OpenID provider.
December 11th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Im just kicking the bucket to make it ring louder. Being a provider is nice but everyone is a provider. Until websites become consumers the whole system is doomed. This is a shame Im tired of trying to manage my 40+ usernames and passwords.
December 11th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Francis Lacoste posted this as a comment on the Launchpad 2.1.11 release announcement:
“A lot of users have asked to be able to login and post on third party sites
using their Launchpad identity. It’s more than simply not using having to
create an account, but also a way to socialize their open-source contributions
by linking to their Launchpad profile page.
“But, you’ll be happy to know that we’ll be adding the possibility to add
OpenID identities to your account and use them to log in early next year.”
December 15th, 2008 at 9:58 am
This is great!
I’ve never used OpenID before this and I’ve used this several times already. Using this is immensely simple and straightforward. Thanks for this great feature. (Among many others, of course)
P.S. Why can’t we comment here using OpenID? 😉
December 15th, 2008 at 9:59 am
@Matt Re logging into this blog with OpenID, it’s coming. I’m not sure exactly when but it should be early 2009.
December 16th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
I’m a bit late to the party, but I have to chime in to agree with most of the comments on this story. We don’t need YAOP (Yet Another OpenID Provider). Everyone and their mom is an OpenID provider these days. We need all those providers to *also* be consumers.
The whole point of OpenID is to decouple authentication from the service. Why would I want to tie my ID to a particular non-OpenID service (Facebook, Launchpad, etc.)? Rather, I want to use an OpenID-focused provider to authenticate to all the other services.
December 17th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Great …. but:
Every day a new site proudly announces support for OpenID … but always as an OpenID provider. With no place to actually login using OpenID it is quite useless.
December 18th, 2008 at 9:21 am
To those who haven’t spotted it, you might be happier if you read my comment, above, that we’re making Launchpad into an OpenID consumer next year 🙂
Also, we needed Launchpad to be an OpenID provider for a few different things we’ve been working on internally – including our new Drupal modules – and it makes sense for us to share that ability with everyone. We didn’t sit and think, “Hey, how can we make this useful only to half the people?” 🙂
June 25th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
For those interested, the bug for implementing OpenID consumer login for Launchpad is:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad-foundations/+bug/210943
June 10th, 2010 at 6:09 am
Another year and a half passed. Is Launchpad now an OpenID consumer? Nope!
May 15th, 2011 at 8:36 pm
Almost another year… and still no go.
March 12th, 2012 at 11:14 pm
And 10 months later, and still Launchpad is not an OpenID consumer.
March 19th, 2012 at 1:52 pm
Patches welcome! 😉
To expand on that, I mean that making Launchpad an OpenID consumer might be of interest to us but we have limited engineering time and issues that we consider more pressing to solve. We are an open source project and will support people who want to submit code to Launchpad.