Phx.Gen.Auth

An authentication system generator for Phoenix 1.5+ applications.

Overview

The purpose of phx.gen.auth is to generate a pre-built authentication system into a Phoenix 1.5+ application that follows both security and elixir best practices. By generating code into the user's application instead of using a library, the user has complete freedom to modify the authentication system so it works best with their app. The following links have more information regarding the motivation and design of the code this generates.

• José Valim's blog post - An upcoming authentication solution for Phoenix
• Original pull request on bare phoenix app
• Original design spec

Usage

Generating a Phoenix 1.5 app

phx.gen.auth must be installed into a Phoenix 1.5+ application.

Once the installer is installed, a new project can be generated by running

$ mix phx.new my_app

Please note, the --no-ecto and --no-html options are not supported.

Installation

After running mix phx.new, cd into your application's directory (ex. my_app).

Basic installation

1. Add phx_gen_auth to your list of dependencies in mix.exs

   def deps do
     [
       {:phx_gen_auth, "~> 0.5", only: [:dev], runtime: false},
       ...
     ]
   end

2. Install and compile the dependencies

   $ mix do deps.get, deps.compile
   

Umbrella installation

1. cd into your project's web app directory (ex. apps/my_app_web)

   $ cd apps/my_app_web
   

2. Add phx_gen_auth to your list of dependencies in mix.exs

   def deps do
     [
       {:phx_gen_auth, "~> 0.5", only: [:dev], runtime: false},
       ...
     ]
   end

3. Install and compile the dependencies

   $ mix do deps.get, deps.compile
   

Running the generator

From the root of your phoenix app (or apps/my_app_web in an umbrella app), you can install the authentication system with the following command

$ mix phx.gen.auth Accounts User users

This creates the templates,views, and controllers on the web namespace, and a new MyApp.Accounts context, in the application namespace.

Verify the database connection details for the development and test environments in config/ so the migrator and tests can run properly. Then run the following to create the database

$ mix ecto.create

Next, let's install the dependencies and migrate the database

$ mix deps.get
$ mix ecto.migrate

Let's run the tests and make sure our new authentication system works as expected.

$ mix test

Finally, let's start the our phoenix server and try it out.

$ mix phx.server

Note on apps upgraded from Phoenix 1.4

If you've upgraded your app from Phoenix 1.4, you'll need to make the following update to test/support/conn_case.ex to get mix test to pass:

using do
  quote do
    # Import conveniences for testing with connections
    import Plug.Conn
    import Phoenix.ConnTest
+   import DemoWeb.ConnCase
    alias DemoWeb.Router.Helpers, as: Routes

    # The default endpoint for testing
    @endpoint DemoWeb.Endpoint
  end
end

Changing id types

By default, this generator uses the same type of id fields as the rest of the application. To override this configuration, the generator accepts --binary-id and --no-binary-id flags.

$ mix phx.gen.auth Accounts User users --binary-id

More information about these options are available in the documentation.

Learning more

To learn more about phx.gen.auth, run the following command.

$ mix help phx.gen.auth

You can also look up the mix task in hexdocs.

Upgrading

Since mix phx.gen.auth generates its code directly into your application, upgrading the version of this library will not upgrade your application's current authentication logic.

To see the changes that have been made to the generator output since the version that was used in your application, visit the CHANGELOG and click the [Diff] links for each version. These diffs will show you the changes to make to your application so it can be up to date with the current generator output.

License

Copyright 2020 Dashbit, Aaron Renner

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.