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Server-Side Swift with Vapor

Third Edition · iOS 13 · Swift 5.2 - Vapor 4 Framework · Xcode 11.4

Before You Begin

Section 0: 3 chapters
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Section I: Creating a Simple Web API

Section 1: 13 chapters
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23. GitHub Authentication
Written by Tim Condon

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In the previous chapter, you learned how to authenticate users using Google. In this chapter, you’ll see how to build upon this and allow users to log in with their GitHub accounts.

Setting up your application with GitHub

To be able to use GitHub OAuth in your application, you must first register the application with GitHub. In your browser, go to https://github.com/settings/developers. Click Register a new application:

Note: You must have a GitHub account to complete this chapter. If you don’t have one, visit https://github.com/join to create one. This chapter also assumes you added Imperial as a dependency to your project in the previous chapter.

Fill in the form with an appropriate name, e.g. Vapor TIL. Set the Homepage URL to http://localhost:8080 for this application and provide a sensible description. Set the Authorization callback URL to http://localhost:8080/oauth/github. This is the URL that GitHub redirects back to once users have allowed your application access to their data:

Click Register application. After it creates the application, the site takes you back to the application’s information page. That page provides the client ID. Click Generate a new client secret to get a client secret:

Note: You must keep these safe and secure. Your secret allows you access to GitHub’s APIs and you should not share or check the secret into source control. You should treat it like a password.

Integrating with Imperial

Now that you’ve registered your application with GitHub, you can start integrating Imperial. First, open Package.swift in Xcode and replace:

Integrating with web authentication

As in the previous chapter, it’s important to match the experience for a regular login. Again, you’ll create a new user when a user logs in with GitHub for the first time. You can use GitHub’s API with the user’s OAuth token.

Integrating with iOS

Just like signing in with Google, you should offer the ability to sign in with GitHub on iOS as well. You’ve already done most of this work in the previous chapter :]

Where to go from here?

In this chapter, you learned how to integrate GitHub login into your website using Imperial and OAuth. This complements the Google and first-party sign in experiences and allows your users to choose a range of options for authentication.

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