Barebones Authentication with AWS-Amplify

Just enough to get started…

This is meant to demonstrate how to create an application AWS-Amplify with a focus on Authentication.

Some pages will require authentication, others will not.

Please note that I will be assuming familiarity with react and react-router. I will be assuming that you may be fairly new to AWS and the Amplify library, so we will touch on those elements in more detail.

Application and AWS Setup

1. First, let’s create an app. We’ll be using create-react-app for this walkthrough. If you don’t have it already you can install it by running yarn global add create-react-app in a terminal window. Once create-react-app is installed, run the following command to create a new application.

create-react-app amplify-auth-examples

cd amplify-auth-examples

2. Next, we want to initialize our project using the awsmobile CLI. If you don’t already have it, you can install by running yarn global add awsmobile-cli in a terminal window.

Before we go forward, we need to setup a user to act as the admin for our project so the CLI can access the things it needs (e.g. permissions to provision AWS services for us on our behalf). Head over to AWS IAM Management and login with your AWS credentials.

3. Next, click on Users on the left-hand menu. Click the Add User button at the top. Enter a username, like amplify-auth-examples-admin and select the checkbox next to Programmatic access for the Access Type. Click Next.

4. On the next screen, click the Create group button beneath the Add user to group heading. For the group name, enter AuthAdministrator or something similar and select the checkbox next to the AdministratorAccess item from the list. Click Create group at the bottom of the screen to confirm and close the dialog. Click the Next:Review button at the bottom.

5. On the next screen, click the Create user button.

6. You should see a success message at the top of the page confirming that our user was created successfully. At this point, you can download the CSV using the button provided, or copy the Access key ID and Secret access key elsewhere. We will need them in just a minute.

7. Back in your terminal, run the following command in the terminal to initialize awsmobile:

awsmobile init

This will prompt you multiple times, and you can press enter to accept the defaults for each of the first four prompts. After these prompts, it will say missing aws account settings. It will ask if you want to configure aws account settings. Type Y to accept.

This is where the Access key ID and Secret access key come into play. Paste the Access key ID and Secret access key when it promps for it. (If you don't have them or you mess up, you can just press Ctrl + C (Cmd on OSX) to exit and try again.) Use the arrow keys to select us-east-1 for the region and press enter. It will ask what name you would like to use for the project. Press enter to accept the default or choose your own. It will take a second to initialize your project and leave you back at the command-line.

8. Next, we need to initializeuser-signin to allow us to interact with AWS Cognito and provide authentication functionality for our users. Run the following commands in the terminal.

awsmobile user-signin enable

Press enter to accept the default.

awsmobile push

This command will sync your local configuration changes to your project in Mobile Hub.

Just to make sure everything is working, let’s test the app by running yarn start at the command line. The application should start and you should see the default create-react-app splash page.

Home Page & Header Links

Next, we need to install react-router, react-router-dom, and the aws-amplify-react library.

yarn add react-router react-router-dom aws-amplify-react

These get our libraries out of the way. We’ll be focusing on App.js from now on. Open that file and delete everything inside the div tag with the className of App. In its place, just put an <h1> tag with the words Home Page. You can delete the logo import as well. Your App.js should look like this:

We’re not going to worry about creating separate files. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. :P

Next, we’ll add a simple routes structure to demonstrate having different pages. Since I’m assuming some familiarity with react-router, I'm not going to go as in depth on these. If you need a primer, you can check out this article or the official docs.

Add the Link and Router imports from react-router-dom to the imports section on the page.

import { Link, BrowserRouter as Router } from 'react-router-dom';

Beneath the imports, add the following functional component.

Add the declaration for this component beneat the h1 in our App declaration. We also need to add our Router component so react-router can compose the Link component properly.

Routes

Now let’s add some router outlet to our application. This will be the place where our different route components get injected in the page when we click on our header links.

Create a Routes functional component with the following code. Place it right above the App declaration.

We will come back to the AuthComponent component in a bit to implement our authentication with aws-amplify.

Place the declaration for this beneath the HeaderLinks declaration in the App.

If you run your app now, you should see that clicking on the links load the different pieces of content we have defined for each of our routes. However, we want the secret page to only be accessible to logged in users, and if someone tries to access it, they should be redirected to the auth page to login or create an account. Let's implement this functionality.

Protected Routes

We’re going to implement a ProtectedRoute component that prevents the user from accessing content unless they're logged in. This will follow the same structure as a Route from react-router; we will just be passing some additional information to it.

1. Right above the AuthComponent component declaration, create a ProtectedRoute component with the same Route as our secret route.

2. Because we will be using this in place of our Route, the elements that are specific to our component will be passed in. This means that we will replace them with the props of the component.

3. Replace the Route declaration for the secret page in our Routes list and you should see that everything is working the same way as before.

4. We have successfully replaced our Route with our ProtectedRoute! Now we can work to implement the logic to redirect if the user is not logged in. This will take one more change to our App component and the Routes component. Above the render method of the App component, declare the following state object so we can track whether the user is logged in.

5. Let’s pass this to our Routes component in our App as an authState prop.

6. Next, update our Routes declaration to accept these new props and pass it down to our ProtectedRoute.

7. Now we need to implement our redirect. If the user is logged in, we want to render the component we passed in. If the user is not logged in, we want to redirect them to the auth page and store the redirect URL so we can let them to continue to the intended page after they have logged in.

Add the Redirect import to our react-router-dom import at the top of App.js.

import { Link, BrowserRouter as Router, Switch, Route, Redirect } from 'react-router-dom';

8. Update the ProtectedRoute declaration to handle our new state that’s passed in.

If you try your app now, you should see that clicking the Secret Page link should change the URL and content to render the auth route, while keeping the redirect set to the secret route. Change the isLoggedIn state to true to test what happens if the user isLoggedIn. This time, you should pass straight to the secret route without any redirect.

9. Finally, we need to clean up from our component evolution. It works as is, but we can use destructuring to clarify our meaning and make it look prettier. Let’s start by destructuring out the props that we care about.

Here, we have taken the render prop that contains our div, and rename it to C. This is the Component that we eventually want to render. We rename props to childProps because we're going to pass it to the child component that we will eventually render (in this case, C). Finally, we take all the other props and assign them to the rest variable using the spread operator.

The following snippet is the entire component. It uses the C declaration to create a component and spread the rProps from the render prop and the childProps from our parent component so that our final rendered component has everything that we passed down to begin with. The redirect is the same as before.

This gives us a good foundation to implement our AuthComponent component using aws-amplify. Let's continue.

Authentication

Let’s change our focus to the AuthComponent component we stubbed our earlier. It should look like this.

That’s fairly simple. Let’s add the basic aws-amplify Authenticator component. We have to add it to the imports at the top of the page.

import { Authenticator } from 'aws-amplify-react';

Replace our Auth Section text in the AuthComponent with the Authenticator declaration.

You should see the component on the page when you go to the auth route.

The nice part about Amplify is that this is all there is to it. We now have Authentication available to us in a simple way. However, we are diverging from the more common use case of wrapping our entire app with this component. This will enable us to have certain sections of the app where the user need not be logged in to interact with our application. We want to be able to communicate our authenticated state to the rest of the app. This is where the amplify library can also help us. It provides a hook for handling the change of state that occurs with this component. It’s called onStateChange. Let's implement that now.

Inside your AuthComponent component declaration, create a method called handleStateChange. This is what will take in the state of the component and allow us to check against it. The code for this method is below.

Update the Authenticator to use this method.

This should be all we need to enable the creation of a user. However, if you try, you will get an error that says No userPool. This is because we have not yet told the amplify library to use the configuration we setup earlier. Let's do that now.

Import the Amplify and Auth libraries from aws-amplify.

import Amplify, { Auth } from 'aws-amplify';

We need to also import the aws_exports configuration that was created for us when we ran awsmobile init.

import aws_exports from './aws-exports';

Now, we can use that configuration file to configure the Amplify library. Add the following line just below the imports at the top of App.js.

Amplify.configure(aws_exports);

With this out of the way, head over to the auth page and use the Authenticator to create a user. The default settings have multi-factor authentication (MFA) turned on, so you’ll go through a couple text messages to sign up and login, and if successful, you should see a greeting like this.

Success!

Let’s add a console log statement to our handleStateChange function to see what this component is doing.

Try logging in, and watch the console. You should see confirmSignIn and signedIn events that are passed to our handleStateChange function.

Now that we can get access to our state, let’s implement the hook that allows us to tell the rest of the app when we are logged in.

Recall from earlier that we have our isLoggedIn state available at the application level. This is what we can pass to our components to let us know if the user is logged in. We need to be able to update this piece of state, so we need to pass a function to our AuthComponent to let us do this.

1. In the App component, create a function called handleUserSignIn.

2. Replace the render method with the following snippet. This will collect our multiple props into a childProps object that we can pass into our routes.

3. Before we can pass our function to our auth route, we need to create a route that accepts props. This will be very similar to our authenticated route, but we won’t care whether the user is logged in or not. Create a new functional component called ProppedRoute right beneath the ProtectedRoute.

4. Update the Routes component to accept the new childProps prop and pass it to the auth route, which we have changed to be our new ProppedRoute component.

5. Now that we have a function we can use to alert the app that we’re signed in, let’s wire it up. In the AuthComponent, replace the //handle state change comment with a call to the onUserSignIn function prop.

6. To check that it worked, add this snippet beneath the HeaderLinks component to let us know the status of the user. Sign out and refresh the app. Head to the auth page and sign in. You should see the text change from 'Not Logged In' to 'User is Logged In', confirming that our state update took place!

That’s it!

I hope this was a clear and concise introduction to using aws-amplify for authentication between different types of routes. If you noticed, there's actually very little hanging off amplify itself. The key is using the library to abstract out the tedious bits, and hang your application state off of it to utilize wherever you need it. This example should serve as a baseline to expand upon when you need different elements of authentication state among different components and routes.

The code for this walkthrough in its entirety can be found here.

The text in markdown format is available here

I can be reached on Twitter @mwarger — hit me up for any questions or if you see any problems with this example.