Below you will find links to all the documentation you will need to get started with Authic
So, you have decided that you want to use Authic in your web application. Great stuff! We're really happy to have you on board :-) The steps outlined in this guide and you'll be integrated with Authic in a jiffy.
If you don't already have an Authic account, go and Sign Up and Sign In. Don't worry, it's pretty painless* (and we have a free plan), I'll wait here until you get back.
* if you think it could be better, let us know so we can improve it for the next person.
Authic uses the magic of OAuth to integrate with your web application. The first step in making this possible is to register some details of your web application with Authic, which will allow Authic to communicate with your web app.
For a step-by-step guide to registering an Authic Client Application see our cunningly named Register your first client application guide.
For Authic to work with your web application, your application needs to allow authentication with OAuth. If you have ever coded a web application that allows authentication with Twitter or Facebook connect you will be familiar with what is involved.
Thankfully for most popular programming languages there are great third-party libraries that help make OAuth authentication much easier.
To make things even easier for Rails and Node.js programmers we have published our own open source libraries (hosted at GitHub ). We also have plans to support PHP, Python and Java in the future.
Is your favourite language/framework not here? Contact us at hello@authic.com and let us know what you would like us to support.
We currently have two ways to add Authic support to your Rails apps:
We currently have one Node.js library, but we plan to have more in the future:
Our aim at Authic is to provide a seamless experience for your users. Ultimately we don't want your users to notice us at all as we take care of your app's authentication experience. To go the extra step to make Authic fade into the background you can make use of our embedded forms.
To get the skinny on embedding Authic's forms directly into your pages check out our Embedded Forms guide.
Beyond the core information about your application there are many extra confirguration options available to you to help customize the Authic experience to make it "just right" for your users.
For instance you might want your users to "Join" instead of "Sign Up" or you might want allow your users to login before they have confirmed their email address instead of confirming it immediately.
For a complete overview of all the options available for your application please read through our documentation on our Extra Options
In addition to extra options, Authic also provides a number of highly configurable text fields for collecting extra information from your users. Each field has a variety of configuration options that are described here.
Having difficulties? We're here to help. Please don't hesitate to contact us (Carl & James) with your questions at hello@authic.com and we'll swing into action like Batman and Robin down our firemen poles (Carl is the boy wonder by the way).
We hope that your experience with Authic has been enjoyable every step of the way. If there is anything we can do to make it better we would love to hear from you at hello@authic.com
We think we have got a good product with the existing Authic functionality, but we're not going to stop here. We have a list of features on our roadmap that a mile long, but there is always room for more. If there are any features you would love to see Authic have, then shoot us an email at hello@authic.com so we can prioritize our development roadmap.
4. Hook up Social Services
Authic makes it easy to hook up 3rd party services with which your users will be able to choose to authenticate with instead of plain username/password.
We have created a separate setup guide for each supported provider to help you through the process
Is you favorite OAuth provider not listed? Get in touch at hello@authic.com and yell at us in ALLCAPS until we add support.