Firebase Realtime Database Tutorial

 

Adding User Authentication

As previously outlined, access to the data stored by this app will only be available to authenticated users. Though only email/password authentication will be used in this project, the mechanism for accessing the user’s data are the same regardless of choice of authentication provider. Begin the authentication implementation process by opening the Firebase console in a browser window and selecting the Firebase Examples project created at the beginning of the book. Navigate to the Authentication screen, select the Sign-In Method tab and enable the Email/Password provider if it is currently disabled.

Return to the project in Android Studio and select the Tools -> Firebase menu option. When the Firebase assistant panel appears, locate and select the Authentication section and click on the Email and password authentication link.

In the resulting panel, click on the Connect to Firebase button to display the Firebase connection dialog. Choose the option to store the app in an existing Firebase project and select the Firebase Examples project before clicking on the Connect to Firebase button.

With the project’s Firebase connection established, refer to the Firebase assistant panel once again, this time clicking on the Add Firebase Authentication to your app button. A dialog will appear outlining the changes that will be made to the project build configuration to enable Firebase authentication. Click on the Accept Changes button to implement the changes to the project configuration. Since this project is going to make use of the FirebaseUI Auth API, two more dependencies need to be added to the module level build.gradle file for the project. Within the Project tool window, locate and double-click on the build.gradle (Module: app) file so that it loads into the editor.

Once the Gradle file has loaded, modify the dependencies section to include the firebase-ui and firebase-ui-auth libraries (note that more recent versions of these libraries may have been released since this book was published):

dependencies {
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
    androidTestCompile('com.android.support.test.espresso:espresso-core:2.2.2', {
        exclude group: 'com.android.support', module: 'support-annotations'
    })
    compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:25.3.1'
    compile 'com.android.support.constraint:constraint-layout:1.0.2'
    compile 'com.google.firebase:firebase-auth:11.0.1'
    compile 'com.firebaseui:firebase-ui:2.0.1'
    compile 'com.firebaseui:firebase-ui-auth:2.0.1'
    testCompile 'junit:junit:4.12'
}