authentication

Authentication

This example demonstrates how to implement a GraphQL server with an email-password-based authentication workflow based on Prisma & graphql-yoga.

Get started

Note: prisma is listed as a development dependency and script in this project's package.json. This means you can invoke the Prisma CLI without having it globally installed on your machine (by prefixing it with yarn), e.g. yarn prisma deploy or yarn prisma playground. If you have the Prisma CLI installed globally (which you can do with npm install -g prisma), you can omit the yarn prefix.

1. Download the example & install dependencies

Clone the Prisma monorepo and navigate to this directory or download only this example with the following command:

curl https://codeload.github.com/graphcool/prisma/tar.gz/application-server | tar -xz --strip=2 prisma-master/examples/application-server

Next, navigate into the downloaded folder and install the NPM dependencies:

cd application-server
yarn install

2. Deploy the Prisma database service

You can now deploy the Prisma service (note that this requires you to have Docker installed on your machine - if that's not the case, follow the collapsed instructions below the code block):

yarn prisma deploy

I don't have Docker installed on my machine

To deploy your service to a demo server (rather than locally with Docker), please follow this link.

3. Explore the API

This example seeds some data into the database for us to explore some queries and features of the data model. Please take a look at seed.graphql for reference. Feel free to add/remove more data via mutations.

To start the server, run the following command

yarn start

The easiest way to explore this deployed service and play with the API generated from the data model is by using the GraphQL Playground.

Open a Playground

You can either start the desktop app via

yarn playground

Or you can open a Playground by navigating to http://localhost:4000 in your browser.

Register a new user with the signup mutation

You can send the following mutation in the Playground to create a new User node and at the same time retrieve an authentication token for it:

mutation {
 signup(email: "[email protected]", password: "graphql") {
  token
 }
}

Logging in an existing user with the login mutation

This mutation will log in an existing user by requesting a new authentication token for her:

mutation {
 login(email: "[email protected]", password: "graphql") {
  token
 }
}

Checking whether a user is currently logged in with the me query

For this query, you need to make sure a valid authentication token is sent along with the Bearer-prefix in the Authorization header of the request. Inside the Playground, you can set HTTP headers in the bottom-left corner:

Once you've set the header, you can send the following query to check whether the token is valid:

{
 me {
  id
  email
 }
}

If the token is valid, the server will return the id and email of the User node that it belongs to.