Authenticate Meteor accounts with the Apollo GraphQL API

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 10:21:20 +0000

One of the popular features of Meteor is its accounts package. As you know, it makes it fairly easy to add a user authentication solution to your Meteor app or add support for different oAuth services. With the possibility to integrate an Apollo GraphQL API into your Meteor app this became a bit more difficult. The Apollo stack does not support an out of the box solutions to authenticate users with Meteor accounts. Jonas Helfer, one of the Apollo core devs, proposed two ways to authenticate users with your app:

Meteor create user with a profile and custom attributes

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 20:34:48 +0000

For Meteor there are not many options left when choosing a user account package. The built-in option is the only use- and successful solution so far. The package is well documented and works like a charm. However, whenever I set up the account system in Meteor I am confronted with these two scenarios:

How can I extend the user profile object with data from a registration form? (A user should be able to edit the profile data himself later on.)
And how can I add other attributes to the user collection object? (A user should not be able to change a custom attribute himself later on.)

These are two fundamental obstacles almost every developer faces when setting up the account system. There are a lot of solutions out there on how to do this in Meteor properly, but a lot of them are poorly described and make it difficult the get the right idea of how the account system works. It got even more difficult due to API changes and Meteor itself that changed a lot over years. Now I would like to give a good example for this two questions.

Accounts on Janik von Rotz

Authenticate Meteor accounts with the Apollo GraphQL API

Meteor create user with a profile and custom attributes