🚀 MERN authentication with email verification, hooks and docker (prod/dev).

🎮 Demo: https://mern-auth-client.herokuapp.com/login

⚠️ Demo code is outdated, had to replace with unstyled version for now. CSS styles, Google Captcha, Sentry usage and some other not essential dependencies like notifications are only in the demo. This repository aim to have a fast to use boilerplate.

⭐ The project if it helped you!

🐳 Docker

Boilerplate now is fully usable with docker, it integrate the MongoDB database, the React/Redux frontend and NodeJS/Express backend.

If you do not have docker: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/

Docker allows to deloy the app in docker containers in one line in the CLI.

Environment variables

You have to set the following environment variables in server.dev.env file (rename server.example.env to server.dev.env):

• SENDGRID_API_KEY, the backend uses Send Grid to send emails, you can register and get a free key on their website: https://sendgrid.com/. ⚠️ You cannot use the app without a key. Validation links are sent in http not https, you can modified that in server/routes/auth.js if you want to go https in deployment.

• SESSION_KEY, it is the secret key that is used to compute the hash of sessions. It is important to use a strong key: https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity/docs/vpn/how-to/generating-pre-shared-key.

• SENDING_EMAIL, the email address you want to use to send confirmation email to the user.

Development

in the root directory:

docker compose up --build

It supports hot reloading for both the frontend and backend.

Production

Set server.prod.env and client.prod.env files.

Note: server.prod.env is used at runtime and can be defined in docker-compose directly, client.prod.env is used at docker image build time, to do so we define env for the docker-compose parser through --env-file then pass the envs to docker build through arguments.

in the root directory:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml --env-file client.prod.env up --build

Frontend app uses an Nginx server to deliver static files.

You may want to use the flag --remove-orphans

To deploy on Heroku refer to their documentation:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/deploying-with-docker

💻 Boilerplate

MERN Stack with advanced authentication :

• Email verification (Token Based) with resend/reset option, Login with forgot password feature.

• Server side sessions.

• Docker for development and production with hot reloading.

• Mongodb.

• Express.

• React/Redux based on Create React App.

• React Hooks.

• Nodejs.

• Typescript.

• Passport-js local.

• Sendgrid API for emails.

🔒 Security

This repository is scanned with snyk and code scanning from github for vulnerabilities. Do not use this code blindly, audit it first.

ℹ️ How to ?

• Use emails for authentication instead of usernames: https://github.com/flaviuse/mern-authentication/issues/7

• I added a dependency but my docker container does not found it: https://medium.com/@semur.nabiev/how-to-make-docker-compose-volumes-ignore-the-node-modules-directory-99f9ec224561 (either install the dependency in the container with the cli or reset the volume).