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Registration & Login

Registration and login operations involve 6 different systems (we ignore here the presence of unified-api and oathkeeper to simplify the technical explanation of the current flows focusing more on the interaction between our app and the systems that store and manage the data of the users):

  • Frontend (web app + mobile app);
  • Backend (Okuna) that manages user profiles;
  • Identity provider (Ory) that manages the user identities;
  • Chat server (Matrix Synapse) that manages user chat accounts;
  • Owncloud
  • Novu notification cloud

Here below is described the registration and login flow that involves the three main actors of the system (Frontend, Backend and Ory), in the next section: Integration with 3rd party software it’s explained how the integration with the other two systems (Matrix and Owncloud) works.

Registration flow​

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The registration involved 3 systems and multiple iterations between them.

  • The user, via web app or mobile app, performs registration with email and password. The user is then registered on Ory which returns the active session to the frontend and the verification flow to execute.
  • The frontend then will start the verification flow requesting Ory to send the verification email containing the verification code. The user will insert the verification code inside the form and a request for verification will be sent to Ory that will return a Response containing a success or error payload.
  • At the same time, the frontend will save and retrieves the user's data through a GET to our Okuna backend.
  • At that point, the user will create his user profile by entering personal data such as name, pronouns, location, etc. Okuna will update the user profile and update the user information (first and last name) in Ory calling the admin API /admin/identities/ provided by Ory.
  • The users email, names and language preferences are stored as a subscriber in novu

Login flow​

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The authentication flow is simple and involved all the three systems.

  • The user, via web app or mobile app, performs the login to Ory with email and password. The user is then authenticated on Ory which returns the active session that contains all the identities to the frontend.
  • The frontend at this point wIll retrieve the user's data from Okuna using the identity id returned from Ory.

The authentication works a bit differently for mobile and web, especially on how the Ory session token is stored and used. For more information about this check the Authentication and Authorization page.