Check for Signed-in User in AngularFire

A common requirement in any app is to determine if the current user is logged-in. Or you might want to check if a database record exists before performing some logic. Doing this in an elegant want throughout your AngularFire2 app is not always obvious.

While we could use RxJS, I find it much easier to handle these situations with Promises because they are NOT streams, but rather simple one-off operations.

Get the Current User

Converting an Observable to a Promise requires a completed signal from the stream. The AngularFire auth state will not complete automatically, so we pipe in the first operator to kill it after the first emitted value.

Promise-Based Solution

If prefer this approach for the elegant async/await syntax.

import { first } from 'rxjs/operators';


isLoggedIn() {
   return this.afAuth.authState.pipe(first()).toPromise();
}

async doSomething() {
   const user = await isLoggedIn()
   if (user) {
     // do something
   } else {
     // do something else
  }
}

Observable-Based Solution

Here’s the equivalent with an Observable. Not quite as elegant, especially when you need to perform this logic frequently,

import { first, tap } from 'rxjs/operators';

isLoggedIn() {
   return this.afAuth.authState.pipe(first())
}

doSomething() {
  isLoggedIn().pipe(
    tap(user => {
      if (user) {
        // do something
      } else {
        // do something else
      }
    })
  )
  .subscribe()
}

Check if a Firestore Document Exists

We can use a similar helper to determine if a certain Firestore document exists.

docExists(path: string) {
   return this.afs.doc(path).valueChanges().pipe(first()).toPromise()
}

Let’s say we want to find or create a document.

async findOrCreate(path: string, data: any) {
  const doc = await docExists(path);

  if (doc) {
    return 'doc exists'
  } else {
    await this.afs.doc(path).set(data)
    return 'created new doc'
  }
}