Recipe — Building an Amber Authentication System

https://amberframework.org

Prerequisites:

• Familiar with MVC and terms such as Migrations, Database
• Amber Framework CLI already installed (Installation Instructions)
• One of the supported databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite
• Terminal console

Overview

Virtually all web applications require a form of authenticating and registering users. As a result, most web frameworks have an excessive amount of options for implementing authentication, but Amber Framework differs by providing a built-in generator for basic authentication that can be customized and extended easily providing your tools that allows you to get started quick without unnecessary complexity.

Using Amber Authentication Generator

Before you start make sure you have all the prerequisites. Let’s start by first generating an application, for our example we will call our application Blogsy.

1. Generate the Blogsy App

First, we generate our app by typing the following command in a terminal console.

amber new blogsy --deps

Note: The --deps will automatically install project dependencies.

2. Go to your project directory

Amber Commands are perform within the root directory of our project.

cd blogsy

3. Scaffold the User Authentication

Next, scaffold the authentication system this will generate a list of files needed in order to enable authentication for our blog. FType the following command within the root directory of the Blogsy project.

amber g auth User

The above command will give you the following output:

08:26:45 Generate   | Rendering Auth user
08:26:45 Generate   | new       config/initializers/granite.cr
08:26:45 Generate   | new       spec/models/user_spec.cr
08:26:45 Generate   | new       spec/models/spec_helper.cr
08:26:45 Generate   | new       spec/controllers/spec_helper.cr
08:26:45 Generate   | new       db/migrations/20180110202645523_create_user.sql
08:26:45 Generate   | new       db/seeds.cr
08:26:45 Generate   | new       src/models/user.cr
08:26:45 Generate   | new       src/controllers/registration_controller.cr
08:26:45 Generate   | new       src/controllers/user_controller.cr
08:26:45 Generate   | new       src/controllers/session_controller.cr
08:26:45 Generate   | new       src/views/registration/new.slang
08:26:45 Generate   | rewritten src/views/layouts/_nav.slang
08:26:45 Generate   | new       src/views/user/show.slang
08:26:45 Generate   | new       src/views/user/edit.slang
08:26:45 Generate   | new       src/views/session/new.slang
08:26:45 Generate   | new       src/handlers/authenticate.cr

To finalize installing the authentication system migrate the database with the following command:

amber db create migrat

This will output:

08:52:25 (INFO) Database    | Created database blogsy_development
08:52:25 (INFO) Database    | Migrating db, current version: 0, target: 20180110205213147
08:52:25 (INFO) Database    | OK   20180110205213147_create_user.sql

Now we can run our local development server and see our working authentication system.

Run the following command amber w

08:53:52 Watcher    | Terminating app Blogsy...
08:53:52 Watcher    | Compiling Blogsy...
08:53:52 Watcher    | Building project Blogsy...
08:54:05 (INFO) Server  | [Amber 0.6.1] serving application "Blogsy" at http://0.0.0.0:3000
08:54:05 (INFO) Server  | Server started in development.
08:54:05 (INFO) Server  | Startup Time 00:00:00.000596000

4. Sign up and Sign in Pages

To see the signup page visit http://0.0.0.0:3000/signup

Recap

Amber framework provides a built-in authentication generator that takes away complexity away, allowing the developer to focus on the task rather on implementations details. The built in authentication system is simple make it easy to modify to developer needs.

Next

- [From Zero to Deploy](https://amberframework.org/guides/getting-started/quick-start.md#zero-to-deploy)
- [Amber Framework Guides](https://amberframework.org/guides/getting-started/README.md#getting-started)
- [Crystal Play](https://play.crystal-lang.org/#/cr) — an online playground to run Crystal code
- Get real time help [Amber Community Channel](https://gitter.im/amberframework/amber)
- GitHub (help the community)[https://github.com/amberframework/amber] and star the project