Authentication in Ionic/Cordova App

Question

First off, I\'m no pro.

In my quest to become a better developer I am trying to understand what is needed and how to accomplish creating a sign-up/login for an Ionic-Fra

Answer 1

I actually needed something like that for a few apps I'm working on. I spent quite some time investigating this and was able to achieve that.

I'm pretty happy with the result, in addition to email/password authentication I've added some social authentication which works in the same way.

1. open url on client side with the provider's (facebook/twitter/instagram) url for login
2. the user logs in and is redirected to the server's callback url (my server is written in nodejs)
3. once I've got the access token from the provider. I save this token and then create a token for the client to reuse every time the user wants to access a protected ressource.

Download the apk and test it.

If this is what you're looking for you can checkout both the client side code at : https://github.com/malikov/Authenticate.me-client-cordova-ionic

And the server side code at : https://github.com/malikov/Authenticate.me-Node-Server

Answer 2

nathvarun gave a very complete answer, but I'd like to share the steps I do for authentication in my app.

1. Send email + password via ajax to the server
2. Generate a token in the server and send it back to the app
3. Store email + token in localStorage
4. For every single request I make to the server I send email + token via POST
5. In the server I verify authenticity of that user with that token, if true the method is executed, if false I send back to the app an error (401)
6. If app receives success, then it's ok, if receives error I redirect to login screen.

Nice thing is that when the app is open, you can get the email + token from localStorage, send to the server, if that token is ok for that user, redirect to main screen, otherwise redirect to login. Then whenever user clears the cache of the app, he is redirected to login screen.