Learn how to customize the user registration experience with Auth0 Actions.
Did you know that you can customize some of the features Auth0 provides? You can do it with Actions. Are you looking for an example? Let me show you how to customize the user experience when they register with an application.
Auth0 and User Registration
Using Auth0 to secure your application offers a lot of simplification right from the user's initial visual impression: the login page. The Auth0 Universal Login page not only relieves you of the burden of authenticating users but also of the task of managing their self-registration. In fact, in the default configuration, if the user doesn't have an account to access your application, they have the opportunity to register themselves through the Sign up link highlighted in the following picture:
Following that link, the user can provide an email address and a password to start the registration and authentication process in no time.
All this happens without any intervention on your side. It's all-inclusive!
Customize the User Registration Experience
That's pretty fine, but maybe you are wondering how to customize the user registration experience, for example, by sending a custom welcome email message. Say you want to thank the user for registering and make them aware of the terms and conditions for using the application. This is what you are going to learn right in this article!
You will learn that you can extend Auth0 standard flows and customize them for your needs. In particular, you will use Auth0 Actions to send your welcome email message after the user signs up for your application.
Let's start!
The Sample Application
For this purpose, you will use a sample application that will let you experience the proposed solution firsthand.
The sample application you are going to use in this article is built with C# and requires .NET installed on your machine. However, the user registration customization you are going to implement is independent of your application's specific programming language and framework.
To get that sample application, clone it from GitHub with the following command:
git clone https://github.com/auth0-blog/acme-aspnet-mvc.git
After you download the application, follow the instructions in the README file to configure it in order to use Auth0. Of course, you need an Auth0 account. If you don't have it, you can get one for free.
If you want to learn more about how the sample application was built, you can check out this blog post.
After configuring the sample application, you can run it with the following command:
dotnet run
Pointing your browser to the https://localhost:7095/ address, you should get the following page:
What Are Auth0 Actions?
As said, you are going to use Auth0 Actions to customize the user registration process.
Auth0 Actions are JavaScript functions running in a Node.js environment executed when specific events happen in some internal Auth0 flows.
For example, you can run one or more Auth0 Actions when a user authenticates or change their password. You can run them before or after the user registers or when you send an SMS to your provider for multi-factor authentication. You can see Actions as event handlers that run when a specific Auth0 event fires. For example, in our specific case, you want to handle the event that fires right after the user registers with Auth0. When this event happens, you want to run your code to send a customized welcome email message. You can imagine this event handling as shown by the following picture:
To implement this behavior, you are going to use the Auth0 Dashboard, which provides you with an editor, a test environment, an integrated deployment environment, and a versioning tool.
You can check out these blog posts for a quick introduction to Auth0 Actions and how they compare with the deprecated Rules and Hooks.
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