How to Login a User inside a Plugin and Redirect to page?

Question

In my plugin I try to login a user and redirect them to a specific page, but when I redirect the user, they are not logged in :-/

I have tried multiple variations of code that looks like this:

$wp_user = get_user_by( 'email', '[email protected]');
wp_clear_auth_cookie();
do_action('wp_login', $wp_user->user_login, $wp_user);
wp_set_current_user($wp_user->ID);
wp_set_auth_cookie($wp_user->ID, true);
$redirect_to = '/' . $redirectUrl;

if ( wp_safe_redirect($redirect_to ) ) {
    exit;
}

How can I programmatically login the user and redirect them to a specific page?

Answer 1

Try change this:

if ( wp_safe_redirect($redirect_to ) ) {
    exit;
}

To:

wp_safe_redirect($redirect_to )
exit;

Answer 2

Are you trying to log them in or redirect them after they login themselves?

If the later, use the login_redirect hook -

https://developer.wordpress.org/ref.../hooks/login_redirect/

Answer 3

I used the following code to do that in order to let clients see a site that I don't want shown publicly. For my use case, I just need it to go to the url they typed in. You can put whatever you want where I added the comment.

I had to add the '?noredirect=true' part because otherwise you end up getting a multiple redirect issue.

I hope this is helpful.

function dwd_redirect_logged_out() {
    if (isset($_POST['wp-submit'])) {}
    else {
        if ( !is_user_logged_in() ) {
            if (!isset($_GET['noredirect'])) {
                wp_redirect(wp_login_url() . '?noredirect=true'); 
                exit;
            }
        }
        else {
            // PUT A wp_redirect() statement here to go somewhere else
        }
    }
}
add_action('init', 'dwd_redirect_logged_out');