Google App Engine provides several useful services based on Google infrastructure. One example is the Users service, which lets your application integrate with Google user accounts. With the Users service, your users can employ the Google accounts they already have to sign in to your application.
The Users service makes it easy to personalize this application's greeting.
Using Users
Edit
myapp/hello.go
again, and replace its contents
with the following:
Reload the page in your browser. Your application presents you with a link
that, when followed, will redirect you to the local version of the Google
sign-in page suitable for testing your application. You can enter any username
you'd like in this screen, and your application will see a fake
user.User
value based on that username.
When your application is running on App Engine, users will be directed to the Google Accounts sign-in page, then redirected back to your application after successfully signing in or creating an account.
The Users API
Let's take a closer look at the new pieces:
The
appengine.NewContext
function returns an
appengine.Context
value associated with the current request.
This is an opaque value used by many functions in the Go App Engine SDK
to communicate with the App Engine service.
If the user is already signed in to your application,
user.Current
returns a pointer to a
user.User
value for the user. Otherwise, it
returns
nil
.
If the user has not signed in, redirect the user's browser to the Google account
sign-in screen by setting a
Location
header and returning an HTTP
status code of 302 "Found".
The redirection includes the URL to this page (
r.URL.String()
) so
the Google account sign-in mechanism will send the user back here after
signing in or registering for a new account.
The
user.LoginURL
function returns an
error
value
as its second argument. Though an error is unlikely to occur here, it is good
practice to check it and display an error user, if appropriate
(in this case, with the
http.Error
helper).
If the user has signed in, display a personalized message using the name
associated with the user's account. In this case, the
fmt.Fprintf
function calls
*user.User
's
String
method to
get the user's name in string form.
For more information about the Users API, see the Users reference .
Note:
for specific paths that should be served only to logged in users,
use the
login: required
directive in the
app.yaml
file. See
the app.yaml reference
for details.
Next…
Our application can now greet visiting users by name. Let's add a feature that will let users greet each other.