EasyAuth now available via NuGet

Now that my new website is live and all working, I've had a bit of time to put EasyAuth on NuGet so everyone/anyone can use it and also so that I can more easily work with projects that do use it (namely this website).

EasyAuth is a simple, secure, and easy to use lightweight alternative to ASP.NET Membership that I have been working on over the last month or two, and this website actually uses it for the administrative authentication.

At the moment it only supports Code-First Entity Framework as a data provider, but my good friend and scholar @LewisArdern is currently working on adding RavenDB support to it.

Install

To install EasyAuth via NuGet, open up your Package Manager Console, and type:

PM> Install-Package EasyAuth

Once installed, EasyAuth takes minimal amount of setup.

In global.asax, you will need to initialise the UserStore and pass that to the Authentication class. We will be using the EntityUserStore for now.

Note that it is possible to extend EasyAuth.Storage.UserStoreContext to enable your website to use the same database as EntityUserStore. I will add a tutorial in the coming days to show how, but you can find an example of it in the source for this website.

The following examples should help you get an idea of how to use EasyAuth. Any questions, please leave a comment.

global.asax

namespace EasyAuthExample
{
    public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication
    {
        // store the instance of the selected UserStore here
        static IUserStore UserStore = EntityUserStore.Instance;

        protected void Application_Start()
        {
            Authentication.UserStore = UserStore;
        }

        protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            // we have to give feed the httpcontext through to the
            // auth class at the beginning of each page request
            Authentication.HttpContext = HttpContext.Current;
        }
    }
}

Web.config

Make sure you remember to put the ConnectionString in for your selected data storage.

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="DefaultConnection"
        providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"
        connectionString="Data Source=(LocalDb)\v11.0;Initial Catalog=EasyAuthExample;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|\EasyAuthExample.mdf" />
</connectionStrings>

Of course you can use other connection strings/data sources, as long as they're valid.

HomeController.cs

Now you create a controller as you would with any regular MVC application, but instead of using the [Authorize] and [AllowAnonymous] attributes, you simply use [EzAuthorize] and [EzAllowAnonymous] instead.

Authenticate a user with Authentication.Login(username, password), and log them out with Authentication.Logout();.

namespace EasyAuthExample.Controllers
{
    [EzAuthorize]
    public class HomeController : Controller
    {
        //
        // GET: /Home/

        [EzAllowAnonymous]
        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            return View();
        }

        //
        // GET: /Home/Login

        [EzAllowAnonymous]
        public ActionResult Login()
        {
            return View();
        }

        //
        // POST: /Home/Login

        [HttpPost]
        [EzAllowAnonymous]
        public ActionResult Login(LoginModel model)
        {
            if (ModelState.IsValid &&
                    Authentication.Login(model.Username, model.Password))
            {
                return RedirectToAction("MembersOnly", "Home");
            }

            ViewBag.Message = "Invalid user credentials";
            return View(model);
        }

        //
        // GET: /Home/Logout

        public ActionResult Logout()
        {
            Authentication.Logout();
            return RedirectToAction("Index", "Home");
        }

        //
        // GET: /Home/MembersOnly

        public ActionResult MembersOnly()
        {
            return View();
        }
    }
}

And that's it!

Create, Read, Update, Delete

It's easy to create, read, update and delete users.

Create Users

Adding users is really easy, and for now just takes two arguments.

void AddUser(string username, string password);

// first we check that the username doesn't already exist
if (!Authentication.UserStore.UserExistsByUsername(username))
{
    // then we simply add them to the database
    Authentication.UserStore.AddUser(username, password);
}

Read Users

The following methods are available to you via Authentication.UserStore.

User GetUserById(int id);
User GetUserByUsername(string username);
List<User> GetAllUsers();

Example:

User test = Authentication.UserStore.GetUserByUsername("TestUser");
int testId = test.UserId;

User test = Authentication.UserStore.GetUserById(14);
string testUsername = test.Username;

List<User> users = Authentication.UserStore.GetAllUsers();
foreach(var user in users)
{
    DoSomething.With(user.Username);
}

Update Users

Updating users is really easy too. Make sure you pass the correct userId and User object!

void UpdateUserById(int id, User user);

User test = Authentication.UserStore.GetUserByUsername("TestUser");
test.Username = "IFancyANewName";
Authentication.UserStore.UpdateUserById(test.UserId, test);

Delete Users

When you have to delete users, sad as it is, you can do that too.

void DeleteUserById(int id);

User test = Authentication.UserStore.GetUserByUsername("TestUser");
Authentication.UserStore.DeleteUserById(test.UserId);

Enjoy!