Bootstrapping RemindMe

First:

Clone the repo
cd into the repo
Install the dependancies

cd RemindMe

npm install
# or
yarn add

Then, run the development server:

npm run dev
# or
yarn dev

Rename the `.env.example`

.env.example => .env

Environment Variables

In order to generate access and refresh token (by signing JWTs), asymmetric public SPKI and private PKCS#8 encoded RSA keys will be needed. This link describes how to generate such keys through the OpenSSL library.

❗To retain formatting, before adding your keys to the appropriate environment variables please ensure that you base64 encode them. Here is a handy site that will encode them for you.❗

Facebook credentials

To allow users signing into our application via Facebook we must follow the OAuth 2.0 protocol and use the Facebook Graph API to authenticate our users.

Follow the guide here to register you application with Facebook.
Enable and configure Facebook Login through the developer dashboard.

By default, Facebook has the email and public_profile permissions/scopes enabled which are the only two our app requires.

Google credentials

To allow users signing into our application via Google we must follow the OAuth 2.0 protocol in order to use Google APIs.

Follow this guide from Google on how to register your application with them.

Once registered, navigate to the Google API Console and locate the OAuth consent screen section. The most important part here is selecting the necessary scopes which are as follows:

email
profile
openid

Once your application is registered and configured with both Facebook and Google, you should be able to locate the appropriate environment variables in each sites respected dashboard and fill them into the .env

Database and Prisma Data Proxy

RemindMe user authorization takes place in the middleware.ts file. The authorization logic eventually calls the database to see if the session is valid. Since middleware in Next.js is run on the Edge, regular TCP database connnection calls are not valid (the runtime is also not Node.js therefore most packages such as PrismaClient are not available, more on this here and here). As a result, we must configure a Proxy to sit between the Edge server and our cloud-based database server.

To get started:

Choose a cloud hosted MySQL DB service (which to choose?), then find and copy the connection string.
Create a Prisma Data Platform project here and use the connection string from the previous step
Follow the instructions here to setup and configure the Prisma Proxy

Everytime you make changes to your schema you must run these scripts:

npm run db-push

npm run generate-client

The first script synchronizes the schema.prisma schema with the database schema. The second script generates a lightweight version of Prisma Client (query builder) so that we can use it on the Edge server. Note, the reason as to why there is a script for this and we are not just running the command is because we need to switch the database URL. Currently it points to the proxy but when we want to make changes to the database we need to switch it to the actual database connection URL

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

RemindMe Authorization API Token Flow

Upon Authentication (via RemindMe or an Identity Provider), Users will be granted API Access and Refresh tokens in the form of a JWT. Read more about Access and Refresh tokens.

OAuth 2.0 OpenID Connect Authorization Code Flow

Upon Authentication with an Identity Provider, Users will be granted an ID token in the form of a JWT, which will be used for authenticating the user and fetching user information. Read more about ID tokens.

Stan-l-e-y/RemindMe