No Individual User Accounts auth option in ASP.NET Core Web API template

Question

I am a bit confused as to why there is no Individual User Accounts authentication option in the latest ASP.NET Core Web API template.

Is it still possible to implement individual user accounts the way that the MVC template does or would it not make sense?

Let's say I am creating a stand-alone web API that is going to have all of my business logic and data layer that accesses the database which has the AspNet Identity tables. I plan on making calls to this API w/ an MVC app.

I know one way of doing this is to create an asp.net MVC app w/ individual user accounts auth and simply build the API right within the MVC app using a controllers/api folder. However, I don't want to do it this way because I want the API to be its own standalone project that can be hosted on a completely different server and accessed by multiple applications, not just an MVC app.

Can someone lead me in the right direction on how authentication typically works in this scenario since there is no template?

Answer 1

Individual User Accounts authentication option for the ASP.NET Core Web API is available in .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1.

Unfortunately .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1 isn't available in VS 2017 release.

But you can install Visual Studio 2017 Preview (you can use it side-by-side with VS 2017 stable version) :

Answer 2

I think you can use IdentityServer4 which allows implementing single sign-on and access control for ASP .NET Core Web APIs using protocols like OpenID Connect and OAuth2. It offers integration with ASP.NET Core Identity and Entity Framework Core.

You will need to install to the following nuget package:

Install-Package IdentityServer4

and add the IdentityServer middleware to the HTTP pipeline:

app.UseIdentityServer();

You can find several quick start samples here or follow this article.