This past autumn, I started playing around with the Composition API, and at the October 2023 Hack and Tell, I put that knowledge into writing a “Job Tracker“. The job tracker used Vuex and Firebase Authentication to log a user in using their Google credentials. With const store = useStore() on your view, you can do something like Welcome, {{user.data.displayName}} but using this technique you can also use …
… to kick off the authentication of the user. I want to use it to finally finish the State Parks app but I also want to use Pinia instead of Vuex, I wanted the resulting app to be a PWA, and I wanted to allow the user to log in with more than just Google credentials. So, this past week, I wrote my “Offline Vue Boilerplate“. It is meant to be a starting point for the State Parks app and a few other apps that I have kicking around in my head. I figured that this week, we should go over what I wrote.
Overview
The whole point of this “boilerplate” application was for it to be a common starting point for other applications that use Firebase for authentication and a NoSQL database. It uses:
I was using a lot of this stack for work projects, also. It is nice because Firebase is cheap and robust and you don’t need to write any server-side code. Hosting of the front-end code is “cheap-as-chips”, also. The Job Tracker is hosted using Firebase Hosting (which is free on the spark plan) and The Boilerplate App is hosted using Render, which is just as free.
Authentication
I am most proud of how I handled authentication with this app. Here is what the Pinia store looks like:
From your view, you can access {{ user }} to get to the values that came out of the single sign-on (SSO) provider (the user’s name, email address, picture, etc). For this app, I used Google and Microsoft but Firebase Authentication offers a lot of options beyond those two.
Adding Google is pretty easy (after all, Firebase is owned by Google) but adding Microsoft was more difficult. To get keys from Microsoft, you need to register your application with the Microsoft identity platform. Unfortunately, the account that you use for that must be an Azure account with at least a Cloud Application Administrator privileges and it can not be a personal account. The account must be associated with an Entra tenant. This means that you need to spin up an Entra tenant to register the application and get the keys.
The third SSO provider that I was tempted to add was Apple but to do that, you need to enroll in the Apple Developer program, which is not cheap.
Firebase Cloud Firestore
I have become a big fan of Firebase Cloud Firestore over the years (at least for situations where a NoSQL database makes sense). The paradigm that I started playing around with last year involved putting the Firebase CRUD functions in the composable.
Here is an example <script> block from the Job Tracker:
The author of the view doesn’t even need to know that Firebase Cloud Firestore is part of the stack. You might wonder how security is handled.
Here is what the security rule looks like behind the job tracker:
The rule is structured so that any authenticated user can create a new record but users can only read, delete, or update if they created the record.
How I made it into a Progressive Web App (PWA)
This is the easiest bit of the whole process. You just need to add vite-plugin-pwa to the dev dependencies and let it build your manifest. You do need to supply icons for it to use but that’s easy enough.
The Next Steps
I am going to be using this as a stepping-stone to build 2-3 apps but you can look forward to a few deep-dive posts on the stack, also.
Have any questions, comments, etc? Please feel free to drop a comment, below.