Facebook Authentication in ASP.NET5 Application

In today's blog post, I will be discussing how to set up Facebook authentication in ASP.NET 5 Web application.

Facebook Authentication in Web Application

To begin with, I created a new web application on Visual Studio 2015RC.
Then I navigated to developers.facebook.com and added a new app. Choose Website as the platform.

 I named the app as TestAuth and you can choose any category and click on Create App ID

 Now your App ID and and App Secret are created and you can view them.

In the Settings tab, I also added my project URL.

Then, in my TestAuth application, I went to Startup.cs file, Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env, ILoggerFactory loggerfactory) method and uncommented the following code:

app.UseFacebookAuthentication();

This adds the Facebook Middleware by adding it to the HTTP Request pipeline.

Next, I added the AppId and AppSecret to my config.json file

  "Authentication": {

    "Facebook": {

      "AppId": "8xxxxxxxxxx",

      "AppSecret":  "2xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

    }

  }

 Now when I run the application and navigate to Login page, I see Facebook login.

Clicking on Facebook button, redirects to the facebook login page. The customer can now use facebook credentials to login to our web application.

Conclusion

So we saw it's easy to set up Facebook authentication on our web application. This prevents the user from the hassle of creating new credentials on our site and for us as web developers, it prevents the hassle of managing the passwords. Similarly, we can use Twitter, Google, etc to set up authentication provider.
For future updates to my weekly blog, please subscribe to my blog via the "Subscribe By Email" feature at the righ.