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Chapter 4: User Authentication with the MEAN Stack

by Simon Holmes & Jeremy Wilken

In this article, we’re going to look at managing user authentication in the MEAN stack. We’ll use the most common MEAN architecture of having an Angular single-page app using a REST API built with Node, Express and MongoDB.

When thinking about user authentication, we need to tackle the following things:

1. let a user register
2. save their data, but never directly store their password
3. let a returning user log in
4. keep a logged in user’s session alive between page visits
5. have some pages that can only been seen by logged in users
6. change output to the screen depending on logged in status (e.g. a “login” button or a “my profile” button).

Before we dive into the code, let’s ...