Twitter Login for Ionic 4

Twitter Authentication in Ionic Framework

There are different ways to integrate Twitter authentication into your Ionic Framework App. However, only the way covered in this post uses the native approach which uses Twitter app to perform the login instead of opening a popup requesting users to enter their credentials to login to Twitter before granting access to your app.

The way it works for hybrid apps to use native APIS and SDKS is simple, you need a piece (typically a Cordova plugin) that connects native APIS and SDKS with the javascript environment where the hybrid apps run. In this case we are going to use a cordova plugin to interact with the Twitter API.

We will use Twitter Connect Plugin to login with Twitter on iOS and Android. You will not only get the name of the user, but also stuff like their full name, followers, and picture.

Ionic Twitter Authentication

For this Ionic example app you will need:

• An Ionic app where you will integrate this login. You can either use a blank app, or an existing one.
• Fabric API key.
• Register a Twitter App and get the Twitter Consumer Key and Twitter Consumer Secret
• The Twitter Connect Plugin to interact with the native Twitter App.

Don't worry, in this twitter authentication with ionic tutorial we will guide you through these steps.

Our Ionic demo app will look like this:

Get a Twitter Fabric API key

Using Twitter's Fabric SDK, you can enable Single Sign On with your Android and iOS apps. To use Fabric, you will need to create an account.

What is Fabric?

Twitter launched Fabric as a modular SDK in 2014 to allow developers to pick and choose different tools to improve their apps. In 2017 Google acquired Fabric with the plan to integrate it with Firebase. Apparently, today you still need to create a Fabric account in order to install the Twitter Connect Plugin because the FABRIC_API_KEY is a required parameter.

After creating the account just go to this link and log in with your new Fabric account. You don't need to do the onboarding process. The only thing we really need from Fabric is the API key, so try not to get messed with other options.

Scroll down to Add Your API Key section and you will see the following code with your app API KEY.

Create your Twitter app

• Go to your Twitter Application Management
• To create an app, you need a Twitter developer account. If you don't have you can create one.
• Follow the steps to Create a new app or use an existing one.
• When creating the app make sure to set Callback URL=twittersdk:// and to enable Sign in with Twitter.

Install Twitter Connect Plugin

After you have your Fabric API key, and your Twitter App Consumer API keys, it’s time to install the cordova plugin into your Ionic app.

Execute the following command on the terminal changing the variables Fabric API Key, Twitter Consumer Key and Twitter Consumer Secret with your own values. (Also remove the <>)

Add Twitter Log In and Log Out

Now we will go straight to the code so open your Ionic project with your preferred code editor. Personally we use atom.

We don't want to ask users to log in each time they open the app because it would be annoying. To solve this we will use NativeStorage to save the user data the first time they log in.

NativeStorage

NativeStorage is a Cordova plugin which provides persistent storage of primitives native in Android, iOS and Windows. It's created because of the non-persistent property of LocalStorage in the WebView of Android and iOS. In iOS stored data from LocalStorage can be removed by the OS, when running out of memory.

To install native storage plugin just run the following commands in your ionic project:

To know if the user is already logged in, we will add the following code to check this in the platform.ready() in app.component.ts.

export class AppComponent {
  constructor(
    private platform: Platform,
    private splashScreen: SplashScreen,
    private statusBar: StatusBar,
    private nativeStorage: NativeStorage,
    private router: Router
  ) {
    this.initializeApp();
  }

  initializeApp() {
    this.platform.ready().then(() => {
      //Here we will check if the user is already logged in
      //because we don't want to ask users to log in each time they open the app
      this.nativeStorage.getItem('twitter_user')
      .then(data => {
        //user is previously logged and we have his data
        //we will let him access the app
        this.router.navigate(["/user"]);
        this.splashScreen.hide();
      }, err => {
        this.router.navigate(["/login"]);
        this.splashScreen.hide();
      })
      this.statusBar.styleDefault();
    });
  }
}

Ionic Twitter Log In

The best way to show you how to add log in functionality to your Ionic Framework App is with a real example of the code, here you can see some Typescript code that handles the all the twitter authentication for your ionic app.

import { Component } from '@angular/core';
import { TwitterConnect } from '@ionic-native/twitter-connect/ngx';
import { Router } from '@angular/router';
import { NativeStorage } from '@ionic-native/native-storage/ngx';
import { LoadingController } from '@ionic/angular';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-login',
  templateUrl: './login.page.html',
  styleUrls: ['./login.page.scss'],
})
export class LoginPage {

  constructor(
    private tw: TwitterConnect,
    private nativeStorage: NativeStorage,
    public loadingController: LoadingController,
    private router: Router
  ) { }

  async doTwLogin(){
    const loading = await this.loadingController.create({
      message: 'Please wait...'
    });
    this.presentLoading(loading);
    this.tw.login()
    .then( res => {
      // Get user data
      // There is a bug which fires the success event in the error event.
      // The issue is reported in https://github.com/chroa/twitter-connect-plugin/issues/23
      this.tw.showUser()
      .then(user =>{
        console.log(user);
        loading.dismiss();
      }, err =>{
        console.log(err);
        // default twitter image is too small https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/accounts-and-users/user-profile-images-and-banners
        var profile_image = err.profile_image_url_https.replace('_normal','');
        this.nativeStorage.setItem('twitter_user', {
          name: err.name,
          userName: err.screen_name,
          followers: err.followers_count,
          picture: profile_image
        })
        .then(() => {
           this.router.navigate(["/user"]);
           loading.dismiss();
        }, (error) => {
          console.log(error);
          loading.dismiss();
        })
      })
    }, err => {
      loading.dismiss();
    })
  }

  async presentLoading(loading) {
    return await loading.present();
  }
}

Ionic Twitter Log Out

To perform Twitter log out we will call the tw.logout() method that will invalidate the token generated at log in. Also, we will remove from the native storage the data from the logged user.

import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core';
import { UserModel } from './user.model';
import { TwitterConnect } from '@ionic-native/twitter-connect/ngx';
import { Router } from '@angular/router';
import { NativeStorage } from '@ionic-native/native-storage/ngx';
import { LoadingController } from '@ionic/angular';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-user',
  templateUrl: './user.page.html',
  styleUrls: ['./user.page.scss'],
})
export class UserPage implements OnInit {

  user: UserModel = new UserModel();

  constructor(
    private tw: TwitterConnect,
    private nativeStorage: NativeStorage,
    public loadingController: LoadingController,
    private router: Router
  ) { }

  async ngOnInit() {
    const loading = await this.loadingController.create({
      message: 'Please wait...'
    });
     await loading.present();
     this.nativeStorage.getItem('twitter_user')
    .then(data => {
      this.user = {
        name: data.name,
        userName: data.userName,
        picture: data.picture,
        followers: data.followers
      };
      loading.dismiss();
    }, error => {
      console.log(error);
      loading.dismiss();
    });
  }

  doTwLogout(){
    this.tw.logout().then(response => {
      this.nativeStorage.remove('twitter_user');
      this.router.navigate(["/login"]);
    }, error => {
      console.log(error);
    });
  }
}

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Next Steps

After having Twitter authentication working in your Ionic v4 App you can focus on:

• Build a Progressive Web App with Ionic and Angular
• Add Google Login to an Ionic App.
• Add Facebook Authentication to an Ionic App.
• Forms and Validations in Ionic
• Add Social Sharing and Deep Linking

Why don’t you give a chance to our Ionic templates and apply this new knowledge?