Building Web Apps with Bolt

Chapter 6. Building a Movie Explorer App, Part 2: Favorites and Authentication

In this chapter, we extend the Movie Explorer app from Chapter 5 with two major features: favorites and authentication. This means users will be able to create an account and, while logged in, mark movies as favorites. The app will save these favorite movies and allow the user to view their personal favorites list any time, from any device (as long as they log in to their account). Ideally, you’ll have your Chapter 5 project open in Bolt. We will add to it from there. If for some reason you didn’t do Chapter 5, Bolt can generate a starting point if you prompt it, but for continuity, I’ll assume you have the Movie Explorer app working, including search and details.

These features are important because authentication adds a personal experience. Users can have their own data (like favorites), and the app can distinguish one user from another, like how you log in to Netflix to get your own watchlist. This is foundational for any multiuser application. And the favorites feature introduces a simple database usage into the app. When a user favorites a movie, that information must be stored somewhere persistent (so it’s not lost when the app reloads). We’ll use Supabase, a popular backend as a service that provides a database, authentication, and storage. Bolt integrates with Supabase out of the box. Supabase essentially gives you a cloud database (using PostgreSQL under the hood) and user auth system with ...