User authentication is often a cumbersome task that becomes essential as an application grows more robust. Firebase Authentication simplifies this process by handling authentication for you. It supports several authentication methods, but for the purpose of this post, we will focus on email and password authentication.
Firebase console
The first step is to create a dashboard to manage your app’s Firebase capabilities. To do this, open the Firebase console and create a new project. Use the name of your app as the project name for better organization and clarity. For the purposes of this post, I will not enable analytics. With these steps completed, your project should be ready to use.
Later on, we will revisit the setup-specific issues for your iOS app.
Creating iOS App scaffolder
Let’s set Firebase aside for a moment and create a blank application. The only important detail in this process is to pay attention to the Bundle Identifier, as we’ll need it in the upcoming steps.
Connect Firebase to your app
Return to Firebase to add it to your app, and select the iOS option
This is the moment to enter your app’s iOS Bundle Identifier.
The next step is to download the configuration file and incorporate it into your project.
The final step is incorporating the Firebase SDK using Swift Package Manager (SPM). To do this, select your project, go to Package Dependencies, and click Add Package Dependency.
Enter the GitHub repository URL provided in Step 3 of the Firebase configuration into the search input box.
Don’t forget to add FirebaseAuth to your target application.
Continue through the Firebase configuration steps, and it will eventually provide the code you need to connect your app to Firebase.
Incorporate this code into your iOS app project, then build and run the project to ensure everything is working properly.
Implement authentication
Get back to Firebase console to set up Authentication
As you can see, there are many authentication methods, but for the purpose of this post, we will only work with the email and password method.
As you can see, there are many authentication methods, but for the purpose of this post, we will only focus on the email and password method.
For this post, I have implemented basic views for user registration, login, logout, and password recovery. All authentication functionality has been wrapped into a manager called AuthenticatorManager. The code is very basic but fully functional and compliant with Swift 6.0.
Don’t worry if I go too fast; the link to the code repository is at the end of this post. You’ll see that the code is very easy to read. Simply run the project, register an account, and log in.
You can find the project code at following repository.
Conclusions
Firebase provides a fast and efficient way to handle user authentication as your app scales.
References
- Firebase Authentication Documentation
Firebase Docs
- ¡Adiós al patrón Singleton en clases en Swift 6!
Apple Coding Academy Post