Ionic User Authentication with NodeJS

For your enjoyment this project provides a basic Ionic app and Express server with functionality for user authentication using bearer tokens, as specified by RFC 6750.

Prerequisites

1. Install npm
2. Install Ionic CLI
3. Install MongoDB
4. Install Gulp

Installation

1. Download project.
2. Run npm install in both mobile and server directories.
3. Modify conf.js in server directory to connect to your MongoDB.
4. Run mongod.
5. Run gulp in server directory to start server.
6. Run ionic serve or ionic build ios; ionic emulate ios; in mobile directory.
7. Eat cookies

If using ionic serve I used this solution to do HTTP requests right from the browser.

This project has not been tested in an production enviroment, so the API may not work without the Access-Control-Allow-Origin being set properly.

Mobile App

The mobile app is very basic. It starts you off in a "Welcome" screen that has one button Create Profile. This transitions you into a Create Profile page. After creating a profile and storing the authToken in the device's local storage, it transitions you to a sample page where you can get a user from the protected /api/user/get route. You can also test the 401 server response on this page by clearing out the authToken and requesting a user from /api/user/get. This causes the mobile app to display a Login Modal that requires to first authenticate, and then proceeds to get the user.

Thanks to KD Moore Consulting which provides a more detailed look at this process.

The Point

I finally figured out how to link up my Ionic App with a backend using bearer tokens for authentication, so I wanted to provide a solution that will hopefully help you on your journey to creating mobile apps.