This example demonstrates how to implement Payload Authentication. Follow the Quick Start to get up and running quickly. There are various fully working front-ends made explicitly for this example, including:

Follow the instructions in each respective README to get started. If you are setting up authentication for another front-end, please consider contributing to this repo with your own example!

Quick Start

To spin up this example locally, follow these steps:

First clone the repo
Then cd YOUR_PROJECT_REPO && cp .env.example .env
Next yarn && yarn dev
Now open http://localhost:3000/admin to access the admin panel
Login with email demo@payloadcms.com and password demo

That's it! Changes made in ./src will be reflected in your app. See the Development section for more details.

How it works

The users collection exposes all auth-related operations needed to create a fully custom workflow on your front-end using the REST or GraphQL APIs, including:

Me
Login
Logout
Refresh Token
Verify Email
Unlock
Forgot Password
Reset Password

The cors, csrf, and cookies settings are also configured to ensure that the admin panel and front-end can communicate with each other securely.

Access Control

Basic role-based access control is setup to determine what users can and cannot do based on their roles, which are:

admin: They can access the Payload admin panel to manage your application. They can see all data and make all operations.
user: They cannot access the Payload admin panel and have a limited access to operations based on their user.

A beforeChange field hook called protectRoles is placed on this to automatically populate roles with the user role when a new user is created. It also protects roles from being changed by non-admins.

Development

To spin up this example locally, follow the Quick Start.

Seed

On boot, a seed script is included to create a user with email demo@payloadcms.com, password demo, the role admin.

NOTICE: seeding the database is destructive because it drops your current database to populate a fresh one from the seed template. Only run this command if you are starting a new project or can afford to lose your current data.

Production

To run Payload in production, you need to build and serve the Admin panel. To do so, follow these steps:

First invoke the payload build script by running yarn build or npm run build in your project root. This creates a ./build directory with a production-ready admin bundle.
Then run yarn serve or npm run serve to run Node in production and serve Payload from the ./build directory.

Deployment

The easiest way to deploy your project is to use Payload Cloud, a one-click hosting solution to deploy production-ready instances of your Payload apps directly from your GitHub repo. You can also deploy your app manually, check out the deployment documentation for full details.

Questions

If you have any issues or questions, reach out to us on Discord or start a GitHub discussion.