meteor/docs/client/basic/sections/accounts.md

{{#template name="basicAccounts"}}

Accounts

To get accounts functionality, add one or more of the following packages to your app with meteor add:

• accounts-ui: This package allows you to use {{dstache}}> loginButtons}}` in your templates to add an automatically generated UI that will let users log into your app. There are several community alternatives to this package that change the appearance, or you can not use it and use the advanced Accounts methods instead.
• accounts-password: This package will allow users to log in with passwords. When you add it the loginButtons dropdown will automatically gain email and password fields.
• accounts-facebook, accounts-google, accounts-github, accounts-twitter, and community packages for other services will allow your users to log in with their accounts from other websites. These will automatically add buttons to the loginButtons dropdown.

{{dstache}}> loginButtons}} Client

Include the loginButtons template somewhere in your HTML to use Meteor's default UI for logging in. To use this, you need to add the accounts-ui package:

$ meteor add accounts-ui

{{> autoApiBox "Meteor.user"}}

Get the logged in user from the Meteor.users collection. Equivalent to Meteor.users.findOne(Meteor.userId()).

{{> autoApiBox "Meteor.userId"}}

{{> autoApiBox "Meteor.users"}}

This collection contains one document per registered user. Here's an example user document:

{
  _id: "bbca5d6a-2156-41c4-89da-0329e8c99a4f",  // Meteor.userId()
  username: "cool_kid_13", // unique name
  emails: [
    // each email address can only belong to one user.
    { address: "cool@example.com", verified: true },
    { address: "another@different.com", verified: false }
  ],
  createdAt: Wed Aug 21 2013 15:16:52 GMT-0700 (PDT),
  profile: {
    // The profile is writable by the user by default.
    name: "Joe Schmoe"
  },
  services: {
    facebook: {
      id: "709050", // facebook id
      accessToken: "AAACCgdX7G2...AbV9AZDZD"
    },
    resume: {
      loginTokens: [
        { token: "97e8c205-c7e4-47c9-9bea-8e2ccc0694cd",
          when: 1349761684048 }
      ]
    }
  }
}

A user document can contain any data you want to store about a user. Meteor treats the following fields specially:

• username: a unique String identifying the user.
• emails: an Array of Objects with keys address and verified; an email address may belong to at most one user. verified is a Boolean which is true if the user has verified the address with a token sent over email.
• createdAt: the Date at which the user document was created.
• profile: an Object which (by default) the user can create and update with any data.
• services: an Object containing data used by particular login services. For example, its reset field contains tokens used by forgot password links, and its resume field contains tokens used to keep you logged in between sessions.

Like all Mongo.Collections, you can access all documents on the server, but only those specifically published by the server are available on the client.

By default, the current user's username, emails and profile are published to the client. You can publish additional fields for the current user with:

// server
Meteor.publish("userData", function () {
  if (this.userId) {
    return Meteor.users.find({_id: this.userId},
                             {fields: {'other': 1, 'things': 1}});
  } else {
    this.ready();
  }
});

// client
Meteor.subscribe("userData");

If the autopublish package is installed, information about all users on the system is published to all clients. This includes username, profile, and any fields in services that are meant to be public (eg services.facebook.id, services.twitter.screenName). Additionally, when using autopublish more information is published for the currently logged in user, including access tokens. This allows making API calls directly from the client for services that allow this.

Users are by default allowed to specify their own profile field with Accounts.createUser and modify it with Meteor.users.update. To allow users to edit additional fields, use Meteor.users.allow. To forbid users from making any modifications to their user document:

Meteor.users.deny({update: function () { return true; }});

{{> autoApiBox "currentUser"}}

{{/template}}