Add support for authentication

[jyasskin]

I'm fairly new at React, so this could be the wrong design entirely, but:

It looks like a good way to handle authentication is to write:

componentWillMount() {
  firebaseRef.onAuth(auth => this.setState({auth: auth}));
},
componentWillUnmount() {
  firebaseRef.offAuth(...);
},

It would be nice if ReactFire would handle dropping the current authentication state into a component's state, instead of needing this custom code.

[jwngr]

That definitely does seem like a good way to handle Firebase Authentication state. I don't think it's worth putting in ReactFire proper though. It already is only two lines of code and I don't think the addition of the other user management methods really adds much to the library. It makes sense in AngularFire since we promisify the API and handle the digest loop for you automatically. Those don't seem like huge selling points in React (especially the digest loop one). So, I think for now we'll keep ReactFire minimal and not include authentication.

[jyasskin]

It's more than the 6 lines I showed. When you fill in the offAuth(...), you wind up needing to pull the whole callback out into a separate function so that you can pass the same object to offAuth as you passed to onAuth. Then there's interaction with http://stackoverflow.com/q/32688547/943619 if you want to use the uid to bind any state. I wound up with the following mixin:

export let AuthStateMixin = {
  componentWillMount() {
    firebaseRoot.onAuth(this._AuthStateMixin_onAuth, this);
  },
  componentWillUnmount() {
    firebaseRoot.offAuth(this._AuthStateMixin_onAuth, this);
  },

  _AuthStateMixin_onAuth(auth) {
    this.setState({auth: auth});
    if (this.onAuth) {
      this.onAuth(auth);
    }
  },
};

Components that want to watch something that depends on the auth state then define:

  onAuth(auth) {
    if (this.firebaseRefs.userData !== undefined)
      this.unbind('userData');
    if (auth)
      this.bindAsObject(userBaseRef.child(auth.uid), 'userData');
  }

[jwngr]

Fair enough. Let me think about it and talk with some others on the team. Re-opening this for now. Thanks for all the example code!

[ShashankaNataraj]

+1 to this feature. react fire makes everything else so easy, auth should be a part of it too!

[jwngr]

Firebase Auth support is coming in ReactFire 2.0.0. Check out https://github.com/firebase/reactfire/pull/123.

[samtstern]

We have officially deprecated reactfire, as we no longer believe it is the best solution for Firebase developers looking to integrate with React.

Please see the README for information on how to migrate to a better solution. We are working on some new efforts to better serve the React community in the future.