Build a User Management App with Ionic Vue

This tutorial demonstrates how to build a basic user management app. The app authenticates and identifies the user, stores their profile information in the database, and allows the user to log in, update their profile details, and upload a profile photo. The app uses:

• Supabase Database - a Postgres database for storing your user data and Row Level Security so data is protected and users can only access their own information.
• Supabase Auth - users log in through magic links sent to their email (without having to set up passwords).
• Supabase Storage - users can upload a profile photo.

Project setup#

Before we start building we're going to set up our Database and API. This is as simple as starting a new Project in Supabase and then creating a "schema" inside the database.

Create a project#

1. Create a new project in the Supabase Dashboard.
2. Enter your project details.
3. Wait for the new database to launch.

Set up the database schema#

Now we are going to set up the database schema. We can use the "User Management Starter" quickstart in the SQL Editor, or you can just copy/paste the SQL from below and run it yourself.

Get the API Keys#

Now that you've created some database tables, you are ready to insert data using the auto-generated API. We just need to get the Project URL and anon key from the API settings.

1. Go to the API Settings page in the Dashboard.
2. Find your Project URL, anon, and service_role keys on this page.

Building the app#

Let's start building the Vue app from scratch.

Initialize an Ionic Vue app#

We can use the Ionic CLI to initialize an app called supabase-ionic-vue:

Then let's install the only additional dependency: supabase-js

And finally we want to save the environment variables in a .env. All we need are the API URL and the anon key that you copied earlier.

Now that we have the API credentials in place, let's create a helper file to initialize the Supabase client. These variables will be exposed on the browser, and that's completely fine since we have Row Level Security enabled on our Database.

Set up a login route#

Let's set up a Vue component to manage logins and sign ups. We'll use Magic Links, so users can sign in with their email without using passwords.

Account page#

After a user is signed in we can allow them to edit their profile details and manage their account.

Let's create a new component for that called Account.vue.

Launch!#

Now that we have all the components in place, let's update App.vue and our routes:

Once that's done, run this in a terminal window:

And then open the browser to localhost:3000 and you should see the completed app.

Bonus: Profile photos#

Every Supabase project is configured with Storage for managing large files like photos and videos.

Create an upload widget#

First install two packages in order to interact with the user's camera.

CapacitorJS is a cross platform native runtime from Ionic that enables web apps to be deployed through the app store and provides access to native device API.

Ionic PWA elements is a companion package that will polyfill certain browser APIs that provide no user interface with custom Ionic UI.

With those packages installed we can update our main.ts to include an additional bootstrapping call for the Ionic PWA Elements.

Then create an AvatarComponent.

Add the new widget#

And then we can add the widget to the Account page:

Storage management#

If you upload additional profile photos, they'll accumulate in the avatars bucket because of their random names with only the latest being referenced from public.profiles and the older versions getting orphaned.

To automatically remove obsolete storage objects, extend the database triggers. Note that it is not sufficient to delete the objects from the storage.objects table because that would orphan and leak the actual storage objects in the S3 backend. Instead, invoke the storage API within Postgres via the http extension.

Enable the http extension for the extensions schema in the Dashboard. Then, define the following SQL functions in the SQL Editor to delete storage objects via the API:

Next, add a trigger that removes any obsolete avatar whenever the profile is updated or deleted:

Finally, delete the public.profile row before a user is deleted. If this step is omitted, you won't be able to delete users without first manually deleting their avatar image.

At this stage you have a fully functional application!