Sign Up With GitHub

8 min

Introduction

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial, you will need:

An app created at Back4App
See the Create New App tutorial to learn how to create an app at Back4App.
Set up a Subdomain for your Back4app app
See Activating your Web Hosting and Live Query to learn how to create an subdomain in Back4App.
An Github account.

1 - Create a New Back4App App

First of all, it’s necessary to make sure that you have an existing app created at Back4App. However, if you are a new user, you can check this tutorial to learn how to create one.

2 - Create a new Github App

Create a new Github Application by going to Applications/New Fill up the Application name, your Homepage URL, a quick Description and your Authorization callback URL`

Then click Register Application. You should then see your App Secret and Client Secret

3 - Retrieve your Code

Visit the following URL, changing the values for CLIENT_ID for the one you created.

https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize scope=user:email&client_id=CLIENT_ID

and the redirected website will have your code in the URL:

Copy the Code part of the URL only and run the following CURL command replacing the values YOUR_CODE, YOUR_CLIENT_ID, and YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET for the values of your application

1   curl -X POST \
2       -F \'client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID' 
3       -F 'client_secret=YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET' 
4       -F 'code=YOUR_CODE' 
5       -F 'accept=json' 
6       https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token

Run it and you should retrieve your access token:

REMEMBER: the code can be used only once. If you get an error or don’t use your token, you must re-generate your Code to be able to run it again.

4 - Start the development

Now that the Sign In with Github is configured, you can start the development process. The format for AUTHDATA is:

1   {
2     "github": {
3       "id": "user's Github id (string)",
4       "access_token": "an authorized Github access token for the user"
5     }
6   }

Here is the method for the iOS SDK:

1   PFUser.logInWithAuthType(inBackground: "github", authData: ["access_token":tokenString, "id": user]).continueWith { task -> Any? in
2    
3   }

And here for the Android SDK:

1   Map<string, string, bool> authData = new HashMap<string, string, bool>(); 
2   authData.put("access_token", tokenString);
3   authData.put("id", user);
4   ParseUser.logInWithInBackground("github", authData){
5
6   }