User Auth

Starter Code comes with UserService and AuthService pre-built for your use if you opted into user auth through the CLI. UserService provides basic CRUD methods for you app’s users, and AuthService provides methods to manage tokens for authentication and handling password reset. The AuthService implementation is backed by Firebase.

Setting up

  1. Create a new Firebase project using the console if you do not have one
  2. Generate a Firebase service account private key (note: you must be an “Owner” of your project)
    • Go to your project in the Firebase console
    • “Project settings” > “Service accounts” > “Generate private key”
    • A file will be downloaded, copy it into /backend/typescript/ or /backend/python/ and rename it firebaseServiceAccount.json
  3. Add these lines to the root .env file in the repo 
    GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=firebaseServiceAccount.json
# Retrieve the API key from the Firebase console
FIREBASE_WEB_API_KEY=<your-web-api-key>
FIREBASE_REQUEST_URI=http://localhost

Please see Google Sign-in for additional Google OAuth setup instructions.

Basic Auth Flow

In contrast with many other UW Blueprint projects that use both the Firebase Client library and Admin SDK to handle authentication, we use the Firebase Admin SDK server-side only. This is done to decouple the frontend and backend and ensure that new AuthService implementations can easily be substituted. The login, refresh, and API request flows when using auth is illustrated below. While we use REST endpoints in these diagrams, note that the GraphQL flows are identical.

Auth Login Flow
Login Flow
Auth Refresh Flow
Refresh Flow
Auth API Request Flow
API Request Flow

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