Redirecting not logged-in users with iron-router… Again

Question

I am fighting with the common need for redirecting a user to a login page if he is not logged-in (Meteor v0.8.0 on Windows 7).

There are several similar questions on

Answer 1

You can put an if or unless template helper in the layout template.

{{#unless currentUser}}
  {{> loginPage}}
 {{else}}
  {{> yield}}
{{/unless}}

Answer 2

On Meteor 0.8.3 for me works:

Router.onBeforeAction(function () { 
  if (_.include(['formLogin'], this.route.name)){
    return;
  }

  if (!Meteor.userId()) {
    this.redirect('formLogin');
    return;
  }

});

Answer 3

It looks like this has something to do with waiting on subscriptions in waitOn.

The following solves the layout rendering issues for me:

Router.onBeforeAction(function() {
    if (!Meteor.user() && this.ready())
        return this.redirect('/login');
}, {except: ['login']}); 

Answer 4

You just need to return the the result of render() from your onBeforeAction()

onBeforeAction: function () {

  if (_.include(['login'], this.route.name)){
    return;
  }

  if (!Meteor.userId()) {

    return this.render('login');

  }
}

Also note I changed Meteor.user() to Meteor.userId(). This keeps the hook from being rerun every time the current users document chages.

Answer 5

Ok, so it seems that the render function on a route only renders a template into the current layout. To render a template into a different layout you have to call this.setLayout('templateName'). The one caveat seems to be that you'll need to set the layout back after login.

onBeforeAction: function(pause) {
    var routeName = this.route.name;

    if (_.include(['login'], routeName))
        return;

    if (! Meteor.userId()) {
        this.setLayout("newLayout");
        this.render('login');

        //if you have named yields it the login form
        this.render('loginForm', {to:"formRegion"});

        //and finally call the pause() to prevent further actions from running
        pause();
    }else{
        this.setLayout(this.lookupLayoutTemplate());
    }
}

You could also just render the login template as the layout if your login template is all you need by calling this.setLayout('login')