Example of managing users.
Page Contents

loopback-example-user-management

$ git clone git@github.com:strongloop/loopback-example-user-management.git
$ cd loopback-example-user-management
$ npm install
$ node .
Notes

Project Layout

  • common/models contains the extended user files. user.js contains the logic for sending emails and password reset, while user.json contains the model definition.
  • server/boot/authentication.js enables authentication middleware with the enableAuth() method. It’s this middleware that finds the access token id string (usually from the query string) and appends entire token instance onto the express request object as req.accessToken. From there, you can find the user’s ID: req.accessToken.userId (used in the routes.js file, see directly below).
  • server/boot/routes.js contains all the routing logic. In this example, we have used Express to configure the routing since each LoopBack app is an extended version of an Express app.
  • server/viewscontains all the views (or pages) rendered by Express using the EJS templating framework
  • server/datasources.json contains the datasource configurations. Here is where we add an email datasource.
  • server/model-config.json contains the all the model configurations. Here is where we configure the extended user model (lowercase ‘u’) and the email model. The rest of the models are all built-in LoopBack models.
Note

All other files have not been modified from their defaults.

How do you register a new user?

  1. Create a form to gather sign up information
  2. Create a remote hook to send a verification email
Notes
  • Upon execution, user.verify sends an email using the provided options
  • The verification email is configured to redirect the user to the /verified route in our example. For your app, you should configure the redirect to match your use case
  • The options are self-explanatory except type, template and user
    • type - value must be email
    • template - the path to the template to use for the verification email
    • user - when provided, the information in the object will be used in the verification link email

How do you send an email verification for a new user registration?

See step 2 in the previous question

How do you log in a user?

  1. Create a form to accept login credentials
  2. Create an route to handle the login request

How do you log out a user?

  1. Create a logout link with the access token embedded into the URL
  2. Call User.logout with the access token
Notes
  • We use the LoopBack token middleware to process access tokens. As long as you provide access_token in the query string of URL, the access token object will be provided in req.accessToken property in your route handler

How do you perform a password reset for a registered user?

  1. Create a form to gather password reset info
  2. Create an endpoint to handle the password reset request. Calling User.resetPassword ultimately emits a resetPasswordRequest event and creates a temporary access token
  3. Register an event handler for the resetPasswordRequest that sends an email to the registered user. In our example, we provide a URL that redirects the user to a password reset page authenticated with a temporary access token
  4. Create a password reset form for the user to enter and confirm their new password
  5. Create an endpoint to process the password reset
  • For the resetPasswordRequest handler callback, you are provided with an info object which contains information related to the user that is requesting the password reset. Note that this example is set up to send an initial email to yourself (the FROM and TO fields are the same). You will eventually want to change the address in the FROM field.

More LoopBack examples

Tags: example_app