User Account Creation

Learn how to create a user registration API in Go.

User registration

Users can’t access the application unless they have an account and are signed in successfully. So when a user tries to sign up, what happens?

  1. On sign up, we ask our users to provide the user_name and user_email. When they do this, we check against the database to see if the username or email address exists. If either of them is found, we throw an error message, notifying our users that they can’t use that username or email because another user with those details already exists.

  2. If the user_name and email are unique, we’ll let the user proceed to the next step, which is password validation.

  3. During the password validation process, we check to see if the password has a minimum of 8 characters.

  4. After the password check is complete and the user's password passes it, the user's details are sent through the registration endpoint by triggering a POST request.

  5. If the registration is successful, a success status code is returned, and if not, an error code is sent.

  6. The user can now proceed to log in and access the platform. If a user creates a profile and doesn’t verify their email address, they will be denied entry.

Registration endpoint

First, let’s create our reviewers model, userModel.go, in our models folder. The server parses the data to the client using JSON and the data is stored in our Mongo database using bson. Our user model contains our user details. We carry out the following steps:

  1. Create a package, models:

    1. To get our Mongo driver package, we first need to run this command in our terminal: go get go.mongodb.org/mongo-driver/bson/primitive.

  2. Next, write an import statement, and within it, we import two packages:

  • Mongo driver

  • The time package to help with setting the data type for our Created_at and Updated_at values

  1. Then we create our User struct, which helps us define our data types. The struct acts like a middleman between our MongoDB and Go program. It contains the values we’ll be collecting from our users.

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