Hi folks.

Today, I would like to write up a step - by - step guide with a sample web app on how to do Google Sign-In and authorization.

Let’s get started.

EDIT: A sample project of this, and Part 2, can be found here or here.

Setup

Google OAuth token

First what you need is, to register your application with Google, so you’ll get a Token that you can use to authorize later calls to Google services.

You can do that here: Google Developer Console. You’ll have to create a new project. Once it’s done, click on Credentials and create an OAuth token. You should see something like this: “To create an OAuth client ID, you must first set a product name on the consent screen.”. Go through the questions, like, what type your application is, and once you arrive at stage where it’s asking for your application’s name – there is a section asking for redirect URLs; there, write the url you wish to use when authorising your user. If you don’t know this yet, don’t fret, you can come back and change it later. Do NOT use localhost . If you are running on your own, use http://127.0.0.1:port/whatever.

This will get you a client ID and a client secret . I’m going to save these into a file which will sit next to my web app. It could be stored more securely, for example, in a database or a mounted secure, encrypted drive, and so and so forth.

Your application can now be identified through Google services.

The Application

Libraries

Google has a nice library to use with OAuth 2.0. The library is available here: Google OAth 2.0. It’s a bit cryptic at first, but not to worry. After a bit of fiddling you’ll understand fast what it does. I’m also using Gin, and Gin’s session handling middleware Gin-Session.

Setup - Credentials

Let’s create a setup which configures your credentials from the file you saved earlier. This is pretty straightforward.

// Credentials which stores google ids. type Credentials struct { Cid string `json:"cid"` Csecret string `json:"csecret"` } func init () { var c Credentials file , err := ioutil . ReadFile ( "./creds.json" ) if err != nil { fmt . Printf ( "File error: %v

" , err ) os . Exit ( 1 ) } json . Unmarshal ( file , & c ) }

Once you have the creds loaded, you can now go on to construct the OAuth client.

Setup - OAuth client

Construct the OAuth config like this:

conf := & oauth2 . Config { ClientID : c . Cid , ClientSecret : c . Csecret , RedirectURL : "http://localhost:9090/auth" , Scopes : [] string { "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email" , // You have to select your own scope from here -> https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/googlescopes#google_sign-in }, Endpoint : google . Endpoint , }

It will give you a struct which you can then use to Authorize the user in the google domain. Next, all you need to do is call AuthCodeURL on this config. It will give you a URL which redirects to a Google Sign-In form. Once the user fills that out and clicks ‘Allow’, you’ll get back a TOKEN in the code query parameter and a state which helps protect against CSRF attacks. Always check if the provided state is the same which you provided with AuthCodeURL. This will look something like this http://127.0.0.1:9090/auth?code=4FLKFskdjflf3343d4f&state=lhfu3f983j;asdf . Small function for this:

func getLoginURL ( state string ) string { // State can be some kind of random generated hash string. // See relevant RFC: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749#section-10.12 return conf . AuthCodeURL ( state ) }

Construct a button which the user can click and be redirected to the Google Sign-In form. When constructing the url, we must do one more thing. Create a secure state token and save it in the form of a cookie for the current user.

Random State and Button construction

Small piece of code random token:

func randToken () string { b := make ([] byte , 32 ) rand . Read ( b ) return base64 . StdEncoding . EncodeToString ( b ) }

Storing it in a session and constructing the button:

func loginHandler ( c * gin . Context ) { state = randToken () session := sessions . Default ( c ) session . Set ( "state" , state ) session . Save () c . Writer . Write ([] byte ( "<html><title>Golang Google</title> <body> <a href='" + getLoginURL () + "'><button>Login with Google!</button> </a> </body></html>" )) }

It’s not the nicest button I ever come up with, but it will have to do.

User Information

After you got the token, you can construct an authorised Google HTTP Client, which let’s you call Google related services and retrieve information about the user.

Getting the Client

Before we construct a client, we must check if the retrieved state is still the same compared to the one we provided. I’m doing this before constructing the client. Together this looks like this:

func authHandler ( c * gin . Context ) { // Check state validity. session := sessions . Default ( c ) retrievedState := session . Get ( "state" ) if retrievedState != c . Query ( "state" ) { c . AbortWithError ( http . StatusUnauthorized , fmt . Errorf ( "Invalid session state: %s" , retrievedState )) return } // Handle the exchange code to initiate a transport. tok , err := conf . Exchange ( oauth2 . NoContext , c . Query ( "code" )) if err != nil { c . AbortWithError ( http . StatusBadRequest , err ) return } // Construct the client. client := conf . Client ( oauth2 . NoContext , tok ) ...

Obtaining information

Our next step is to retrieve information about the user. To achieve this, call Google’s API with the authorised client. The code for that is:

... resp , err := client . Get ( "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/userinfo" ) if err != nil { c . AbortWithError ( http . StatusBadRequest , err ) return } defer resp . Body . Close () data , _ := ioutil . ReadAll ( resp . Body ) log . Println ( "Resp body: " , string ( data )) ...

And this will yield a body like this:

{ "sub" : "1111111111111111111111" , "name" : "Your Name" , "given_name" : "Your" , "family_name" : "Name" , "profile" : "https://plus.google.com/1111111111111111111111" , "picture" : "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/asdfadsf/AAAAAAAAAAI/Aasdfads/Xasdfasdfs/photo.jpg" , "email" : "your@gmail.com" , "email_verified" : true , "gender" : "male" }

Parse it, and you’ve got an email which you can store somewhere for registration purposes. At this point, your user is not yet Authenticated. For that, I’m going to post a second post, which describes how to go on. Retrieving the stored email address, and user session handling with Gin and MongoDB.

Putting it all together

package main import ( "crypto/rand" "encoding/base64" "encoding/json" "io/ioutil" "fmt" "log" "os" "net/http" "github.com/gin-gonic/contrib/sessions" "github.com/gin-gonic/gin" "golang.org/x/oauth2" "golang.org/x/oauth2/google" ) // Credentials which stores google ids. type Credentials struct { Cid string `json:"cid"` Csecret string `json:"csecret"` } // User is a retrieved and authentiacted user. type User struct { Sub string `json:"sub"` Name string `json:"name"` GivenName string `json:"given_name"` FamilyName string `json:"family_name"` Profile string `json:"profile"` Picture string `json:"picture"` Email string `json:"email"` EmailVerified string `json:"email_verified"` Gender string `json:"gender"` } var cred Credentials var conf * oauth2 . Config var state string var store = sessions . NewCookieStore ([] byte ( "secret" )) func randToken () string { b := make ([] byte , 32 ) rand . Read ( b ) return base64 . StdEncoding . EncodeToString ( b ) } func init () { file , err := ioutil . ReadFile ( "./creds.json" ) if err != nil { log . Printf ( "File error: %v

" , err ) os . Exit ( 1 ) } json . Unmarshal ( file , & cred ) conf = & oauth2 . Config { ClientID : cred . Cid , ClientSecret : cred . Csecret , RedirectURL : "http://127.0.0.1:9090/auth" , Scopes : [] string { "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email" , // You have to select your own scope from here -> https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/googlescopes#google_sign-in }, Endpoint : google . Endpoint , } } func indexHandler ( c * gin . Context ) { c . HTML ( http . StatusOK , "index.tmpl" , gin . H {}) } func getLoginURL ( state string ) string { return conf . AuthCodeURL ( state ) } func authHandler ( c * gin . Context ) { // Handle the exchange code to initiate a transport. session := sessions . Default ( c ) retrievedState := session . Get ( "state" ) if retrievedState != c . Query ( "state" ) { c . AbortWithError ( http . StatusUnauthorized , fmt . Errorf ( "Invalid session state: %s" , retrievedState )) return } tok , err := conf . Exchange ( oauth2 . NoContext , c . Query ( "code" )) if err != nil { c . AbortWithError ( http . StatusBadRequest , err ) return } client := conf . Client ( oauth2 . NoContext , tok ) email , err := client . Get ( "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/userinfo" ) if err != nil { c . AbortWithError ( http . StatusBadRequest , err ) return } defer email . Body . Close () data , _ := ioutil . ReadAll ( email . Body ) log . Println ( "Email body: " , string ( data )) c . Status ( http . StatusOK ) } func loginHandler ( c * gin . Context ) { state = randToken () session := sessions . Default ( c ) session . Set ( "state" , state ) session . Save () c . Writer . Write ([] byte ( "<html><title>Golang Google</title> <body> <a href='" + getLoginURL ( state ) + "'><button>Login with Google!</button> </a> </body></html>" )) } func main () { router := gin . Default () router . Use ( sessions . Sessions ( "goquestsession" , store )) router . Static ( "/css" , "./static/css" ) router . Static ( "/img" , "./static/img" ) router . LoadHTMLGlob ( "templates/*" ) router . GET ( "/" , indexHandler ) router . GET ( "/login" , loginHandler ) router . GET ( "/auth" , authHandler ) router . Run ( "127.0.0.1:9090" ) } }

This is it folks. I hope this helped. Any comments or advices are welcomed.

Google API Documentation

The documentation to this whole process, and MUCH more information can be found here: Google API Docs.

Thanks for reading, Gergely.