How to Add LinkedIn Authentication to a Nuxt3 Application

Authentication is concerned with verifying identities. A typical example is logging into an application using an email or password, thus allowing the system to confirm if the entered credentials match the database's credentials.

Appwrite is a self-hosted backend-as-a-service platform that provides developers with all of the core APIs required to build any application. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is an employment-oriented service aimed at connecting career and business professionals.

This article will discuss how to authenticate a Nuxt3 application using Appwrite’s Linkedin OAuth provider.

GitHub

Check out the complete source code here.

Prerequisites

Understanding this article requires the following:

• Installation of Node.js
• Basic knowledge of TypeScript
• Docker installation
• An Appwrite instance; check out this article on how to set up an instance
• A LinkedIn account (Create an account here)

Creating a Nuxt.js Project

Use npx create-nuxt-app <project-name> to create a new Nuxt.js project.
The process of scaffolding the project would provide a list of options, which should look like this:

We are building our Nuxt3 application with TypeScript. As such, we will need to import the types for the Vue files. To do this, we will create a vue-shim.d.ts in our Nuxt3 application root folder and add the code block below to it:

declare module "*.vue" {
  import Vue from 'vue'
  export default Vue
}

We can start our Nuxt3 application by running the following command:

cd <project name>
npm run dev

Nuxt.js will, in turn, start a hot-reloading development environment that is accessible by default at http://localhost:3000.

Installing Appwrite

To use Appwrite, we will install it in our project, like so:

npm install nuxt-appwrite

Configuring nuxt.config for Appwrite

We need to configure our Nuxt3 application in the nuxt.config file before we can use Appwrite.

To do this, we will register the Appwrite for global use in the nuxt.config.js file by adding nuxt-appwrite in the modules section:

modules: [ 'nuxt-appwrite' ],

Appwrite also has a one-click to install DigitalOcean droplet, allowing us to create an Appwrite droplet directly from DigitalOcean.

Creating a New Appwrite Project

To create a new project, start up the Appwrite instance on your machine and navigate to the specified hostname and port http://localhost:80. Next, we need to log in to our account or create an account if we don’t have one.

Learn more about setting up Appwrite here. On the console, click on the Create Project button.

Clicking on the Create Project will take us to an inner page where we can add our project name. We will add appwrite_linkedin as the name and click Create.

The project dashboard becomes visible on the console after project creation. We can access the inner page from the Settings tab at the top of the page.

The inner page allows us to copy the Project ID and API Endpoint for use in our Nuxt3 application.

We will then proceed to create an init.ts file in our Nuxt.js application’s root directory to initialize the Appwrite Web SDK by adding the code block below:

import { Appwrite } from 'appwrite';
export const sdk = new Appwrite();
sdk
  .setEndpoint('http://localhost/v1') // Replace this with your endpoint
  .setProject('***'); // Replace this with your ProjectID

Activating LinkedIn OAuth provider on Appwrite

We will navigate to the Users section on the main menu, where we can access the Settings tab and select from the list of auth providers.

From the OAuth2 providers, we will look out for the LinkedIn provider to update its settings.

Toggling the LinkedIn provider will bring to view the App ID and App Secret fields to be filled. We will fill these fields shortly, but we need to take note of the “LinkedIn redirect URL” provided as we need it for authentication on the LinkedIn dashboard.

Creating an App on LinkedIn

Appwrite's LinkedIn OAuth provider requires us to create an application on LinkedIn. Here we can click on the Create app button in the middle of the page.

Clicking on the “Create app” button in the middle of the page will bring us to a new page below, where we can fill out the necessary information.

We will navigate to the Auth tab on the application dashboard when creating the application. We will copy the Client ID and Client Secret from our LinkedIn Auth dashboard. These keys can then be added to the empty fields shown in our Appwrite LinkedIn Oauth2 settings.

Just beneath the “application credentials,” we will add the LinkedIn redirect URL from the Appwrite application to the Authorization callback URL in the application, like so:

Building Authentication in Nuxt.js

Our application will have two pages - the login page where authentication happens using the Appwrite LinkedIn provider and another where we display the user details.

Creating the Login Page

The login page is the application’s entry point where users get authenticated. To build this, we will update the pages/index.vue with the code below:

<template>
  <div class="bg-lightest-blue vh-100 pa3 tc">
    <h2 class="black ttc">LinkedIn authentication with Appwrite</h2>
    <div class="br3 bg-dark-blue ba near-white b--black-10 shadow-3 w-100 w-60-m w-30-l mw6 center mt5 ph4 pv4">
      <p class="f3">Click on this button to login</p>
        <button class="link dim br3 pv2 ph2 mb2 dib black fw6 bg-white ba b--navy pointer mt3 mt0-l inline-flex items-center" @click="loginWithLinkedin">
          <span class="f4 ml2 pr2">Login with Linkedin</span>
        </button>
    </div>
  </div>
</template>
<script lang="ts">
import {sdk} from '~/init'
export default {
  methods: {
    loginWithLinkedin: async function(){
      try {
        await sdk.account.createOAuth2Session('linkedin', 'http://localhost:3000/dashboard')
      } catch (error) {
        console.log(error)
      }
    }
  }
}
</script>

In the code block, we achieved the following:

• The <template> tag contains the markup for displaying the login UI
• Imported the Apprwite SDK initialized in the init.ts file
• We created a loginwithLinkedin asynchronous function that uses the imported Appwrite SDK; within this function, we added the Appwrite createOAuth2Session method that received the following:
  • linkedin: this is the OAuth2 provider we would like users to use to sign in
  • A redirect URL where users are directed after successful authentication

Creating the Dashboard Page

Next, we will create a page where users get redirected following a successful login. This page shows the user's name and email with an additional button that allows them to log out. To implement this, we will create a pages/dashboard.vue file and add the code below:

<template>
  <div class="bg-lightest-blue vh-100 pa3 tc">
    <h2 class="tc">Linkedin authentication with Appwrite</h2>
    <div class="br3 bg-dark-blue ba near-white b--black-10 shadow-3 w-100 w-60-m w-30-l center mt5 ph4 pv4 mw6">
      <div class="f4 tl">
        <p class="yellow fw7">Name:</p>
        <p>{{name}}</p>
        <p class="mt4 yellow fw7">Email:</p>
        <p>{{email}}</p>
      </div>
      <button class="f4 link dim br3 pv2 ph3 mb2 dib black bg-white ba b--black pointer mt4 mt0-l inline-flex items-center" @click="logOutWithLinkedin">
        Log out
        </button>
    </div>
  </div>
</template>
<script>
import {sdk} from '~/init';
  export default {
    data(){
      return{
        namme: '',
        email: '',
        response: ''
      }
    },
    mounted: function(){
        this.getUserSession()
    },
    methods: {
      getUserSession: async function(){
        try {
          this.response = await sdk.account.get()
          if (this.response) {
            this.name = this.response.name,
            this.email = this.response.email 
          }

        } catch (error) {
          console.log(error)
        }
      },
      logOutWithLinkedin: async function(){
        try {
          await sdk.account.deleteSession('current')
          this.$router.push('/') 
        } catch (error) {
          console.log(error)
        }
      }
    }
  };
</script>

We achieved the following with the snippet above:

• Added the <template> tag for displaying the user information
• Imported the Appwrite SDK initialized in the init.ts file
• Updated the data property with name, email, and response to hold the user’s information
• Created a getSession function which gets executed when the application is mounted. This function fetched the logged-in user information for the current and updated the variables declared in the data property with the information
• Added the logOutWithLinkedin function, which is connected to Appwrite’s deleteSession method (the logOutWithLinkedin function logs the user out of the application and immediately routes the user to the home page)

At this stage, the application should look like the below:

Conclusion

This article explained how to add authentication to an application using Appwrite’s OAuth2 LinkedIn provider.

Resources

Here are some resources that might be helpful:

• Create a local Appwrite instance in 3 steps
• Appwrite account API documentation