Book Image

Hands-On Full-Stack Development with Swift

By : Ankur Patel
Book Image

Hands-On Full-Stack Development with Swift

By: Ankur Patel

Overview of this book

Making Swift an open-source language enabled it to share code between a native app and a server. Building a scalable and secure server backend opens up new possibilities, such as building an entire application written in one language—Swift. This book gives you a detailed walk-through of tasks such as developing a native shopping list app with Swift and creating a full-stack backend using Vapor (which serves as an API server for the mobile app). You'll also discover how to build a web server to support dynamic web pages in browsers, thereby creating a rich application experience. You’ll begin by planning and then building a native iOS app using Swift. Then, you'll get to grips with building web pages and creating web views of your native app using Vapor. To put things into perspective, you'll learn how to build an entire full-stack web application and an API server for your native mobile app, followed by learning how to deploy the app to the cloud, and add registration and authentication to it. Once you get acquainted with creating applications, you'll build a tvOS version of the shopping list app and explore how easy is it to create an app for a different platform with maximum code shareability. Towards the end, you’ll also learn how to create an entire app for different platforms in Swift, thus enhancing your productivity.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Adding authentication flow to iOS app


Currently, our iOS will be broken as we have added password and token-based authentication to our Vapor server. We will need to update the iOS such that we ask the user for their email and password on launching of the app and use that to generate a token. Then, we save the token in the UserDefaults of the app and send this token to any request our API make from our app.

Since UserDefaults can only be accessed by the app itself, it is safe enough for our Shopping List app, but for a production-ready app, you might want to consider Keychain API to securely store the token. So let's dive into the app and see how we can update it to support token-based authentication and get it working again:

  1. First, open the iOS ShoppingList project in Xcode and open the Request.swift file. We will be updating the request method so that we can pass headers in the HTTP request as well. We will do this by updating the function signature to the following:
func request(url: String...