Can I create an AWS Cognito user login programmatically?

Question

I would like my app to allow users with a Facebook, Google, Amazon... etc... accounts to be able to login to my app. This works fine through AWS Cognito.

However, is there a way for the app to create a user login programmatically if the user does not have any of those logins?

1. The user would provide an id and a password and the app would send the information to the authentiation provider to create a new login/account.

2. I would not need to implement my own authentication mechanism and worry about how the passwords are stored, etc.

From my research I take that there is no way to do this with existing authentication providers or even other services such as OpenID.

Do you have any other options if I do not want to implement my own login storage and authentication? It would not necessarily need to integrate with AWS Cognito.

Answer 1

I'm a little confused by your question. If you're asking:

Can I create new usernames and passwords on Facebook / Google programatically?

Then the answer is no. You have to sign up for Facebook / Google on their site. If you're asking:

Can I create a new user with a username and password that only exists in Cognito?

Then the answer is yes. To do this, it depends on whether you're creating the user in a browser or on a server. In a browser, use the Cognito Javascript API. On a server, use the Cognito Admin Server APIs.

Here's some sample code for creating a new user on the server in Node JS (replace my strings with your own tokens, especially the ones with @ signs in them):

  let params = {
    UserPoolId: "@cognito_pool_id@",
    Username: "jhancock",
    DesiredDeliveryMediums: ["EMAIL"],
    ForceAliasCreation: false,
    MessageAction: "SUPPRESS",
    TemporaryPassword: "somePassword",
    UserAttributes: [
      { Name: "given_name", Value: "John"},
      { Name: "family_name", Value: "Hancock"},
      { Name: "name", Value: "John Hancock"},
      { Name: "email", Value: "john@gmail.com"},
      { Name: "phone_number", Value: "+15125551212"}
    ],
  };
  console.log("Sending params to cognito: " + JSON.stringify(params));
  let cognitoIdentityServiceProvider = new AWS.CognitoIdentityServiceProvider({region: "us-east-1"});
  cognitoIdentityServiceProvider.adminCreateUser(params, function(error, data) {
    if (error) {
      console.log("Error adding user to cognito: " + JSON.stringify(error), error.stack);
    } else {
      console.log("Received back from cognito: " + JSON.stringify(data));
    }
 }

One you get that working, you'll probably want to see this post about how to change the temporary password into a real one.

Answer 2

Hi from my previous experence in implementing of the social media authentication. I would conclude that it is quite hard to implement.If you do not what to show web view to authenticate user in iOS you need to use iOS ACAccountStore class for this, but even this only gives opportunity to log in not to sign in.