Nuxt3 and Firebase: Users authentication

Here the github repo for who want to fork my template and use it directly.

If you’re looking for a seamless and efficient way to handle user authentication and management in your web applications, Nuxt3 and Firebase make this process incredibly easy. They both have lot of advantages:

Nuxt3 :

• Allow you to have a frontend (and backend), easily deployable with 2 command line to execute (no joke!)
• Has a huge choices of modules available
• Coming from a a backend world, Nuxt is easy to use and understand and simply “make sense”

Firebase and Firebase UI :

• Firebase gives you a nice UI to manager your users
• Implements directly the usual user signup flow such as confirming emails, password hash without you having to do anything
• Has a generous free tier with the Spark plan, up to 50k Monthly Active Users!
• FirebaseUI gives you web, iOS, and Android libraries to eliminate boilerplate code

At the moment of the post, the Nuxt Firebase integration does not support Nuxt3 yet (only nuxt2). We will have to use vuefire instead. There is not much documentation online on how to integrate them both together, so here it is 😉

0. Prepare your project

You’ll need:

• Node.js - v16.10.0 or newer.
• npx : npm install -g npx
• pnpm : I use pnpm over npm because it made the installation of firebase and firebaseui a lot faster.
• A Firebase account : firebase.google.com

1. Initialize the Nuxt3 project

npx nuxi@latest init <project-name>

It created you a bunch of boilerplate files that will be necessary for running your project, including a README.md and a package.json. The files created should look like this:

.
├── README.md
├── app.vue
├── nuxt.config.ts
├── package.json
├── public
│   └── favicon.ico
├── server
│   └── tsconfig.json
└── tsconfig.json

Go to the folder:

cd <project-name>

Install the dependencies, this woll download all the packages that are needed for your nuxt project:

pnpm install

Then start the project!

pnpm run dev

✨ Your project will be available at http://localhost:3000:

2. Install firebase and firebase UI

1. Create a Firebase account : firebase.google.com
2. Head to the console and create a new project
3. Add a Web app project
4. A snispet of code will appear. Copy those credentials
5. Install firebase and firebaseui:

pnpm install firebase firebaseui vuefire

6. Install vuefire and nuxt-vuefire:

pnpm install vuefire nuxt-vuefire

Your package.json should now contains 4 new dependencies:

...
  "dependencies": {
    "firebase": "^9.x.x",
    "firebaseui": "^6.x.x",
    "nuxt-vuefire": "^0.x.x",
    "vuefire": "^3.x.x"
  }
...

7. Restart the server. Nuxt does not seem to manage installation of new packages well so far:

CTRL + C then pnpm run dev

3. Configure Nuxt and Firebase

Int the nuxt We have to:

• Deactivate the SSR
• Add the nuxt-vuefire module
• Head to firebase, copy your credentials

Here what you should add in nuxt.config.ts:

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  devtools: { enabled: true },

  // we deactivate the Server Side Rendering
  ssr: false,

  // Add nuxt-vuefire module
  modules: [
    'nuxt-vuefire',
  ],

  vuefire: {
    auth: true, // enable Firebase Authentication
    config: {
      // replace with your own credentials from the Firebase console
      apiKey: '...',
      authDomain: '...',
      projectId: '...',
      appId: '...',
    },
  },

})

4. Add login views

The last step is to create a view that manage the signin and signup process:

1. Create a components folder, and inside create a Login.vue file with:

<template>
    <div>
      <h2>Login</h2>
      <span v-if="currentUser"> Welcome {{ currentUser.displayName }}</span>
      <span v-else> <div id="firebaseui-auth-container"></div></span>
    </div>
  </template>
  
  <script lang="ts" setup>
  
  import { EmailAuthProvider, GoogleAuthProvider } from 'firebase/auth';
  import * as firebaseui from 'firebaseui'
  import 'firebaseui/dist/firebaseui.css'
  import { useCurrentUser } from 'vuefire';

  const currentUser = useCurrentUser()
  const ui = firebaseui.auth.AuthUI.getInstance() || new firebaseui.auth.AuthUI(useFirebaseAuth());  
  const config = {
    signInOptions: [
      GoogleAuthProvider.PROVIDER_ID,
      EmailAuthProvider.PROVIDER_ID,
    ],
    signInSuccessUrl: "/",
    callbacks: {
      signInSuccessWithAuthResult() {
        console.log("Successfully signed in");
        // window.location = "/";
      },
    },
  }
  
  onMounted(() => {
    ui.start("#firebaseui-auth-container", config);
  })
  
</script>

2. Change app.vue to call the components/Login.vue component we’ve just created:

<template>
  <div>
    <NuxtWelcome />
    <Login />
  </div>
</template>

The changes should look like this

3. Head to the Firebase console, and activate the signup options you want to see:

You’ll have multiple options, from emails, to Facebook and Twitter. here what will look like your Nuxt3 app with Email and Google activated:

The whole project is available in this repo. You can simply clone the project and change the firebase credentials in nuxt.config.ts, and deploy in any of your serverless provider you like!

Thanks for reading

As always, hit me up and let’s hang out. I am thinking a lot about AI, Health, Tooling, Hacking and other stuffs. I now focus on TaipeiDev and HackersBait. If you are in Taipei, come hang out.