7: Adding User Accounts
7.1: Password Authentication
Meteor already comes with a basic authentication and account management system out-of-the box, so you only need to add the accounts-password to enable username and password authentication:
meteor add accounts-password
There are many more authentication methods supported. You can read more about the accounts system here.
We also recommend you to install bcrypt node module, otherwise you are going to see a warning saying that you are using pure-Javascript implementation of it.
meteor npm install --save bcrypt
You should always use
meteor npminstead of onlynpmso you always use thenpmversion pinned by Meteor, this helps you to avoid problems due to different versions of npm installing different modules.
7.2: Create User Account
Now you can create a default user for our app, we are going to use meteorite as username, we just create a new user on server startup if we didn’t find it in the database.
server/main.js
import { Meteor } from 'meteor/meteor';
import { Accounts } from 'meteor/accounts-base';
import { TasksCollection } from '/imports/api/TasksCollection';
..
const SEED_USERNAME = 'meteorite';
const SEED_PASSWORD = 'password';
Meteor.startup(() => {
if (!Accounts.findUserByUsername(SEED_USERNAME)) {
Accounts.createUser({
username: SEED_USERNAME,
password: SEED_PASSWORD,
});
}
..
});
You should not see anything different in your app UI yet.
7.3: Login Form
You need to provide a way for the users to input the credentials and authenticate, for that we need a form.
Create a new file called LoginForm.svelte and add a form to it. You should use Meteor.loginWithPassword(username, password); to authenticate your user with the provided inputs.
imports/ui/LoginForm.svelte
<script>
import { Meteor } from 'meteor/meteor';
let username = "";
let password = "";
const handleSubmit = () => {
Meteor.loginWithPassword(username, password);
}
</script>
<form class="login-form" on:submit|preventDefault={handleSubmit}>
<div>
<label htmlFor="username">Username</label>
<input
type="text"
placeholder="Username"
name="username"
required
bind:value={username}
/>
</div>
<div>
<label htmlFor="password">Password</label>
<input
type="password"
placeholder="Password"
name="password"
required
bind:value={password}
/>
</div>
<div>
<button type="submit">Log In</button>
</div>
</form>
Ok, now you have a form, let’s use it.
7.4: Require Authentication
Our app should only allow an authenticated user to access its task management features.
We can accomplish that rendering the LoginForm component when we don’t have an authenticated user, otherwise we return the form, filter, and list component.
You can get your authenticated user or null from Meteor.user(). Then you can verify if you have a logged user, if yes, render the app, otherwise, your render the LoginForm:
imports/ui/App.svelte
<script>
import { TasksCollection } from '../api/TasksCollection';
import { Meteor } from 'meteor/meteor';
..
let user = null;
$m: {
user = Meteor.user();
..
}
</script>
<div class="app">
..
<div class="main">
{#if user}
<TaskForm user={user}/>
<div class="filter">
<button on:click={() => setHideCompleted(!hideCompleted)}>
{hideCompleted ? 'Show All' : 'Hide Completed'}
</button>
</div>
<ul class="tasks">
{#each tasks as task (task._id)}
<Task task={task} />
{/each}
</ul>
{:else}
<LoginForm />
{/if}
</div>
</div>
7.5: Login Form style
Ok, let’s style the login form now:
client/main.css
.login-form {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
height: 100%;
justify-content: center;
align-items: center;
}
.login-form > div {
margin: 8px;
}
.login-form > div > label {
font-weight: bold;
}
.login-form > div > input {
flex-grow: 1;
box-sizing: border-box;
padding: 10px 6px;
background: transparent;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
width: 100%;
font-size: 1em;
margin-right: 16px;
margin-top: 4px;
}
.login-form > div > input:focus {
outline: 0;
}
.login-form > div > button {
background-color: #62807e;
}
Now your login form should be centralized and look beautiful.
7.6: Server startup
Every task should have an owner from now on. So go to your database, as you learn before, and remove all the tasks from there:
db.tasks.remove({});
Change your server/main.js to add the seed tasks using your meteorite user as owner.
Make sure you restart the server after this change so Meteor.startup block can run again. This is probably going to happen automatically as you make changes in the server side code.
server/main.js
import { Meteor } from 'meteor/meteor';
import { Accounts } from 'meteor/accounts-base';
import { TasksCollection } from '/imports/api/TasksCollection';
const insertTask = (taskText, user) =>
TasksCollection.insert({
text: taskText,
userId: user._id,
createdAt: new Date(),
});
const SEED_USERNAME = 'meteorite';
const SEED_PASSWORD = 'password';
Meteor.startup(() => {
if (!Accounts.findUserByUsername(SEED_USERNAME)) {
Accounts.createUser({
username: SEED_USERNAME,
password: SEED_PASSWORD,
});
}
const user = Accounts.findUserByUsername(SEED_USERNAME);
if (TasksCollection.find().count() === 0) {
[
'First Task',
'Second Task',
'Third Task',
'Fourth Task',
'Fifth Task',
'Sixth Task',
'Seventh Task',
].forEach(taskText => insertTask(taskText, user));
}
});
See that we are using a new field called userId with our user _id field, we are also setting createdAt field.
7.7: Task owner
Now you can filter the tasks in the UI by the authenticated user. Use the user _id to add the field userId to your Mongo selector when getting the tasks from Mini Mongo.
imports/ui/App.svelte
<script>
..
$m: {
user = Meteor.user();
const userFilter = user ? { userId: user._id } : {};
const pendingOnlyFilter = { ...hideCompletedFilter, ...userFilter };
tasks = user
? TasksCollection.find(
hideCompleted ? pendingOnlyFilter : userFilter,
{ sort: { createdAt: -1 } }
).fetch()
: [];
incompleteCount = user
? TasksCollection.find(pendingOnlyFilter).count()
: 0;
..
}
</script>
<div class="app">
..
<div class="main">
..
<ul class="tasks">
{#each tasks as task (task._id)}
<Task task={task} />
{/each}
</ul>
..
</div>
</div>
Also update the insert call to include the field userId in the TaskForm. You should pass the user from the App component to the TaskForm.
imports/ui/TaskForm.svelte
<script>
..
export let user = null;
..
const handleSubmit = () => {
// Insert a task into the collection
TasksCollection.insert({
text: newTask,
createdAt: new Date(), // current time
userId: user._id,
});
..
}
</script>
7.8: Log out
We also can better organize our tasks by showing the username of the owner below our app bar. Let’s add a new div where the user can click and log out from the app:
imports/ui/App.svelte
<script>
..
const logout = () => Meteor.logout();
</script>
..
<div class="app">
..
<div class="main">
{#if user}
<div class="user" on:click={logout}>
{user.username} 🚪
</div>
..
Remember to style your user name as well.
client/main.css
.user {
display: flex;
align-self: flex-end;
margin: 8px 16px 0;
font-weight: bold;
}
Phew! You have done quite a lot in this step. Authenticated the user, set the user in the tasks and provided a way for the user to log out.
Your app should now look like this:
Review: you can check how your code should be at the end of this step here
In the next step we are going to start using Methods to only change the data after checking some conditions.