Create ASP.NET Web Core Razor Application with Authentication

In this guide, I am going to show you how to create a simple ASP.NET Web Application with authentication. I will create a special page that will be available only to authenticated users.

My artifacts are:

  1. Visual Studio 2022
  2. Project Template – ASP.NET Core Web App
  3. .NET 6.0 (Long-term support)

Step 1 – Create a New Application

Run Visual Studio 2022 and create a new project ‘ASP.NET Core Web App’.
ASP.NET CORE Web App
configure new ASP.NET CORE Web App

choose .net 6 and Individual Accounts

Choose .NET 6 Framework and ‘Individual Accounts’(user can register and create login credentials) authentication type. Leave ‘Configure for HTTPS’ checked.

Step 2 – Prepare Database

1. Open the appSettings.json file and set a more user-friendly name for database. In our case it is ‘YarkulTestAuthWebApp’.
appsettings.json database name
2. Go to the menu View -> Other Windows -> Package Manager Console and run the command ‘update-database’. This command starts the database migration. As a result, a set of standard tables for authorization should be created.
open package manager console
If you see the error message ‘update-database : The term ‘update-database’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.’ then try to restart Visual Studio and build your project.
Run update-database PM
And now after migration is done in the SQL Server Object Explorer you can see a list of tables for authentication purposes.
tables for authentication ASP.NET Core

You may also be interested to read my articles related to the Database:

Step 3 – Add a New Page For Authorized Users Only

Add a new Empty Razor Page

Let’s add some information to this page:
customize page for logged in users

Step 4 – Add Authorize attribute for ‘ForAuthUsersOnlyModel’ Page

To secure our page I will add an Authorize attribute. It limits access to that component to authenticated users.
Razor page adding Authorize attribute

Step 5 – Test Application – Navigate to Secure page without Authorization

After we run our application and try to navigate to our page we should be redirected to the login page https://localhost:7170/Identity/Account/Login?ReturnUrl=%2FForAuthUsersOnly

navigate to page with AUTH attribute
default login page Razor Application

Step 6 – Test Application – Register User and Navigate to Sercure page

register demo user
To register a user, we need to verify the email. Since we created the application from the box, the Microsoft developers were very kind and added for such demo applications the possibility to confirm the email without sending the email itself(thank you guys!).

email confirmation for demo application
After confirmation you should log in:
logged in user

And if you enter the path to our secret page, you will see it:
logged in user

As you can see it was not hard to create this application. Microsoft did most of the work for you. And now you know how to create a simple application with authorization.

Leave a Comment