React Native
Once you've set up an Auth API for your application, you can add Auth support to your React Native apps.
Getting Started
To add support for Auth to your React Native apps, you'll first need to set up your React Native app.
Now we'll need to wrap our app with the ThirdwebProvider
which stores the necessary context for Auth, and we'll provide some configuration with the authConfig
option so that our app knows how to communicate with our Auth API.
Note that in React Native auth works with JWT tokens since cookie management is not well supported.
For this reason, you can pass a secureStorage
prop for us to store the JWT for you, if not, it will default to using expo-secure-store
Connect wallet & login button
The simplest way to add an Auth flow to our app is to use the ConnectWallet
button. This button prompts the user to connect to the supportedWallets
specified in the ThirdwebProvider
.
Once connected to a wallet you can call login
to authenticate.
The login
function returns the JWT token which you can use in subsequent requests to your backend.
Connect wallet & auth hooks
For a more customized setup with custom UI or logic, we can instead use the wallet connection and Auth hooks provided by the @thirdweb-dev/react-native
package.
Here, we use the useMetaMaskWallet
hook to prompt our users to connect their metamask wallets, and then we use the useLogin
hook to login to our app with Auth. Then, we can access and display the logged in user with the useUser
hook, and we can logout the user with the useLogout
hook.
For a full list of wallet connection hooks, check out our React Native SDK documentation.
Usage
Check if a user is logged in
On your app, you may want to check whether or not the user is logged in to conditionally render certain parts of your app. You can do this with the isLoggedIn
value from the useUser
hook:
Accessing user & session data
Once a user is logged in, you can access their user data and session data with the useUser
hook. The user
value will be null
if the user is not logged in, but once they're logged in, it will contain the address
of the logged in user, the session context
set by the backend on login, and any extra user-associated data
sent by the backend.
You can think of user.context
as a way for the backend to store arbitrary session data on the JWT, like a user's role or permissions. This data is then accessible on the frontend and doesn't change until a user has to login again.
Meanwhile, user.data
is a way for the backend to send the client any data associated with the current user like their name, profile picture, and other information. Since this data isn't stored on the JWT, it can change at any time.
Using loading states
When using the useUser
hook, you may want to show a loading state while the user's session is being fetched from the backend. You can do this by checking the isLoading
value from the hook:
Similarly, the useLogin
and useLogout
hooks also have loading states to indicate when a request to the backend is being made.
Customizing the login message
The login
function automatically uses some default values for the necessary fields of the EIP4361/CAIP122 specifications.
However, if you want full access to customize these field values, you can overwrite them by passing an object to the login
function:
Handling errors on login
Since logging in requires the user to sign a message, the login
function is asynchronous and may throw an error if the user rejects the message. You can handle this error case by using a try/catch
block:
Cross-origin requests & cookies
Auth in React Native uses secure storage to store the JWT token. This means that you need to pass this token in other calls to your backend.
You should get the token after logging in and pass it down as a header in subsequent network calls.
Switching between logged-in accounts
As discussed in the switching accounts section of the Auth API explanation, Auth enables multiple wallets to login at once. If you use the thirdweb React SDK on the frontend to enable users to connect their wallets via the wallet connection hooks or the <ConnectWallet/>
button, switching accounts will be automatically handled for your users when they switch connected wallets.
However, if you want to customize when accounts or switched or add your own manual account switching flows, you can use the useSwitchAccount
hook exposed by the React SDK.