Firebase to the Rescue?
Firebase is essentially an all-in-one backend running on Google servers that can manage your web/mobile application. Its services ranges from user authentication to databases to performance monitoring to storage, and many more. I only played around with it for two days so far, but the docs were easy to comprehend. I discovered Firebase while I was searching around for a solution to my Rails problem (previous post). Ultimately, I figured that Firebase would be the perfect resolution for my user login authentication component that had been causing me trouble.
To get started, you login with your email and create your application.
Then, you’ll be taken to your project dashboard where you will see the list of services on the left side of the page under Project Overview and inside the develop tab. Click on Authentication where you will see this page.
Up top there are individual tabs for users, sign-in method, templates, and usage. I only utilized the first two, but templates lets you have email and SMS templates for email verifications, password resets, and email address changes, and usage keeps track of how many phone verifications are occurring within your application.
In the sign-in method tab is where you can customize how users can sign-in to your application.
I enabled Facebook because I wanted users to be able to sign-in using their Facebook accounts, and Email/Password was enabled by default. On a side note, if you look below Firebase gives you a domain name for you to use once your application is deployed. For Facebook sign-ins, you have to go to its developer website and register your application once more to get the App ID and App secret that Firebase needs.
You enter the App ID and secret like the above, copy the bottom link and paste it into your application’s configuration so that the user is redirected when using Facebook sign-in.
This is it in terms of setting up your application. The next post will be a thorough explanation of how I integrated my own React.js application with Firebase to build a web application.
***My previous problem which my front and back end were having trouble communicating with each other was magically solved by Firebase. I don’t have to worry anymore about JWT tokens or how my users are being handled by Rails because Firebase takes care of all that for me. My user information was now being saved even after a page refresh, and it’s extremely easy to utilize Firebase and see on its platform realtime how many users have signed up using email or Facebook, and when they signed up. I highly recommend using Firebase if you’re thinking about persisting data and utilizing authentication/sign-in!***
