Creating new user | Sharing Personal Experience

[JeffreyArts]

Context

Today I have been getting to know the Payload CMS via the creation of a demo application that handles user authentication. Creating new users, authenticating them, allowing them to reset passwords, all of that. I did not yet implemented a refreshtoken flow into it, cause my previous hadless CMS did not support that, but pretty sure that's going to be a breeze. I did not want to share this experience, cause I don't think that there is much to learn from. But since Github often just a place where people share problems (bugs, missing features etc.), I thought it'd be nice to share this pleasant experience none the less. Just meant for the dev team to show them that their hard work is being noticed, valued & appreciated.

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Creating a new user


I’d like users to be able to register on my web app, therefor I went to the Authentication page since I already had it open and quickly browsing through this page, I could not find something related to registering new accounts. So I went to the REST API section and could not find anything under the the Auth Operations neither. I scrolled up a little, and noticed the “Create” endpoint underneath the Collections endpoints. So I tried to call that endpoint with the following request body:

{
    email: “[email protected],
    password: “Asdf123”,
    username: “Jeffrey”
}


This got me a 403 Unauthorised error with a “You are not allowed to perform this action.” error message. So I went to the collection I’ve made and see if could find something in the docs to open up this specific endpoint.


import { CollectionConfig } from 'payload/types'

const SiteUsers: CollectionConfig = {
  slug: 'site-users',
  auth: {
    tokenExpiration: 7200, // How many seconds to keep the user logged in
    verify: false, // Require email verification before being allowed to authenticate
    maxLoginAttempts: 5, // Automatically lock a user out after X amount of failed logins
    lockTime: 600 * 1000, // Time period to allow the max login attempts
    // More options are available
  },
  fields: [
    {
        name: "username",
        type: "text"    
    }
  ],
}
export default SiteUsers



I was looking for Collections in the side menu, but couldn’t find it. So I clicked on configuration (cause I did not see anything relevant under the Getting started section), where I found the Collections page. Going through the options, I clicked on the link next to the “access” option, which directed me to the Access Control page, I skipped the video and started reading. Finished reading, I ended up at a button that said “Collection Access Control” which is exactly what I am looking for, so I clicked that button and continued reading. Almost immediately I found what I was looking for, and updated my code by adding the following object to my config.

  access: {
    create: () => true
  },

Conclusion


That was it! Adding a feature to my app that allows people to register an account was such a breeze that came with the unintended insight that it automatically prevents the creation of duplicate accounts based on the email address, great! Compliments to the DEV team and I am getting excited to continue this exploration of Payload to be used in my digital tool belt 😄. This will be the last time I'll share a post here in this format (untill requested otherwise). It is a lot of work to do and it gets spammy verrrrry fast ;)