Build a User Management App with RedwoodJS

This tutorial demonstrates how to build a basic user management app. The app authenticates and identifies the user, stores their profile information in the database, and allows the user to log in, update their profile details, and upload a profile photo. The app uses:

Zuvo Database - a Postgres database for storing your user data and Row Level Security so data is protected and users can only access their own information.
Zuvo Auth - allow users to sign up and log in.
Zuvo Storage - allow users to upload a profile photo.

Zuvo User Management example

About RedwoodJS

A Redwood application is split into two parts: a frontend and a backend. This is represented as two node projects within a single monorepo.

The frontend project is called web and the backend project is called api. For clarity, we will refer to these in prose as "sides," that is, the web side and the api side. They are separate projects because code on the web side will end up running in the user's browser while code on the api side will run on a server somewhere.

The api side is an implementation of a GraphQL API. The business logic is organized into "services" that represent their own internal API and can be called both from external GraphQL requests and other internal services.

The web side is built with React. Redwood's router lets you map URL paths to React "Page" components (and automatically code-split your app on each route). Pages may contain a "Layout" component to wrap content. They also contain "Cells" and regular React components. Cells allow you to declaratively manage the lifecycle of a component that fetches and displays data.

For the sake of consistency with the other framework tutorials, we'll build this app a little differently than normal. We won't use Prisma to connect to the Zuvo Postgres database or Prisma migrations as one typically might in a Redwood app. Instead, we'll rely on the Zuvo client to do some of the work on the web side and use the client again on the api side to do data fetching as well.

That means you will want to refrain from running any yarn rw prisma migrate commands and also double check your build commands on deployment to ensure Prisma won't reset your database. Prisma currently doesn't support cross-schema foreign keys, so introspecting the schema fails due to how your Zuvo public schema references the auth.users.

Project setup

Before you start building you need to set up the Database and API. You can do this by starting a new Project in Zuvo and then creating a "schema" inside the database.

Create a project

Create a new project in the Zuvo Studio.
Enter your project details.
Wait for the new database to launch.

Set up the database schema

Now set up the database schema. You can use the "User Management Starter" quickstart in the SQL Editor, or you can copy/paste the SQL from below and run it.

Dashboard

Go to the SQL Editor page in the Dashboard.
Click User Management Starter under the Reference > Examples tab.
Click Run.

You can pull the database schema down to your local project by running the db pull command. Read the local development docs for detailed instructions.

supabase link --project-ref <project-id>
# You can get <project-id> from your project's dashboard URL: https://studio.zuvodev.com/project/<project-id>
supabase db pull

SQL

supabase migration new user_management_starter

Building the app

Build the RedwoodJS app from scratch.

Make sure you have installed yarn since RedwoodJS relies on it to manage its packages in workspaces for its web and api "sides."

Initialize a RedwoodJS app

We can use Create Redwood App command to initialize an app called supabase-redwoodjs:

yarn create redwood-app supabase-redwoodjs
cd supabase-redwoodjs

While the app is installing, you should see:

✔ Creating Redwood app
  ✔ Checking node and yarn compatibility
  ✔ Creating directory 'supabase-redwoodjs'
✔ Installing packages
  ✔ Running 'yarn install'... (This could take a while)
✔ Convert TypeScript files to JavaScript
✔ Generating types

Thanks for trying out Redwood!

Then install the only additional dependency supabase-js by running the setup auth command:

yarn redwood setup auth supabase

When prompted:

Overwrite existing /api/src/lib/auth.[jt]s?

Say, yes and it will setup the Zuvo client in your app and also provide hooks used with Zuvo authentication.

✔ Generating auth lib...
  ✔ Successfully wrote file `./api/src/lib/auth.js`
  ✔ Adding auth config to web...
  ✔ Adding auth config to GraphQL API...
  ✔ Adding required web packages...
  ✔ Installing packages...
  ✔ One more thing...

  You will need to add your Zuvo URL (SUPABASE_URL), public API KEY,
  and JWT SECRET (SUPABASE_KEY, and SUPABASE_JWT_SECRET) to your .env file.

Next, we want to save the environment variables in a .env. We need the API URL as well as the key and jwt_secret that you copied earlier.

And finally, you will also need to save only the web side environment variables to the redwood.toml.

These variables will be exposed on the browser, and that's completely fine. They allow your web app to initialize the Zuvo client with your publishable key since we have Row Level Security enabled on our Database.

You'll see these being used to configure your Zuvo client in web/src/App.js:

App styling (optional)

An optional step is to update the CSS file web/src/index.css to make the app look better. You can find the full contents of this file in the example repository.

Start RedwoodJS and your first page

Test your setup by starting the app:

yarn rw dev

You should see a "Welcome to RedwoodJS" page and a message about not having any pages yet.

Create a "home" page:

yarn rw generate page home /

✔ Generating page files...
  ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/pages/HomePage/HomePage.stories.js`
  ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/pages/HomePage/HomePage.test.js`
  ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/pages/HomePage/HomePage.js`
✔ Updating routes file...
✔ Generating types ...

You can stop the dev server if you want; to see your changes, run yarn rw dev again.

You should see the Home page route in web/src/Routes.js:

Set up a login component

Set up a Redwood component to manage logins and sign ups. We'll use Magic Links, so users can sign in with their email without using passwords.

yarn rw g component auth

  ✔ Generating component files...
    ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/components/Auth/Auth.test.js`
    ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/components/Auth/Auth.stories.js`
    ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/components/Auth/Auth.js`

Now, update the Auth.js component to contain:

Set up an account component

After a user is signed in we can allow them to edit their profile details and manage their account.

Create a new component called Account.js.

yarn rw g component account

  ✔ Generating component files...
    ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/components/Account/Account.test.js`
    ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/components/Account/Account.stories.js`
    ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/components/Account/Account.js`

And then update the file to contain:

You'll see the use of useAuth() several times. Redwood's useAuth hook provides convenient ways to access logIn, logOut, currentUser, and access the supabase authenticate client. We'll use it to get an instance of the Zuvo client to interact with your API.

Update home page

With all the components in place, update your HomePage page to use them:

Profile photos

Next, add a way for users to upload a profile photo. Zuvo configures every project with Storage for managing large files like photos and videos.

Create an upload widget

Create an avatar so the user can upload a profile photo. Start by creating a new component:

yarn rw g component avatar
  ✔ Generating component files...
    ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/components/Avatar/Avatar.test.js`
    ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/components/Avatar/Avatar.stories.js`
    ✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/components/Avatar/Avatar.js`

Now, update your Avatar component to contain the following widget:

Launch!

Once that's done, run this in a terminal window to launch the dev server:

yarn rw dev

And then open the browser to localhost:8910 and you should see the completed app.

Zuvo RedwoodJS

At this stage you have a fully functional application!