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Kitto Khrangtong
Kitto Khrangtong

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Need help on creating private instances of a web app

Hey guys, I’m venturing out to something I’ve never done before and I’m needing a bit of guidance on how to tackle this use case.

Essentially I’m wanting to create an instance of a part of my web app that is only accessible via a private link without requiring user accounts, so let’s think of the flow as something like this.

We’ll think in terms of a to-do list.

Person 1: Visits website and initiates a private to-do list in which a link is generated. (Only people with this link will be able edit the to-do list)

Person 2: Receives link from person 1 and edits to-do list.

Could anyone lead me in the right direction as to what technologies are required to accomplish this sort of interaction?

Top comments (3)

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coreyja profile image
Corey Alexander

So I don't know if any tools/frameworks exist for this but it sounds doable enough to roll your own!

Assuming you have a web app that can receive requests and some kind of data database (or other data store), I think it might be something like this.

Create a todo-list model (or add a column to your existing model) that can store some kind of UUID private identifier. Since this would be a UUID, it should be unique to every record, and private for this use case.
Then generate a link with that UUID, maybe something like mytodolistapp.com/todos/:UUID:
that looks up the correct todo list by that UUID. Then this page would be responsible for editing the ToDo list. Importantly this page should NOT authenticate the User, as you want them to have access without logging in.

Basically I think you need some sort of secret random identifier that can be used to look up the todo list. Then Users can distribute this identifier and anyone who knows the id can edit the list!

Hope this helps!

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itskitto profile image
Kitto Khrangtong

Awesome, this did help quite a bit! It definitely helped me conceptualize some things in my mind.

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itskitto profile image
Kitto Khrangtong

Thanks for the reply!

Sorry I should’ve been a little clearer. I’m looking for something within the NodeJS + React ecosystem. I figured many of the techs required to accomplished the above task would be stack-agnostic.