How about just a simple personal project I want to only give access to myself and a few friends access to on browser and phone app? User X can access only documents ABC. Users must be logged in. I'm not looking to make a career shift to web dev, but I'd like to be able to build my own cheap toys, basically. While learning interesting and not terrible skills along the way.
- Use sendgrid to send emails, it'll be free at your usage
- Make the login form only accept an email address, dont risk saving passwords, display a generic "if you signed up you'll get an email soon" message on submission for all values.
- Whitelist your buddies' emails, send them a link to login with. Ignore the rest.
- The link can be a UUID without the dashes or something similarly sufficiently random (could sha1 hash the time and be good enough for your purposes). yourdomain.com/login/somesufficientlyrandomandlongkey
- Save that key in the DB, that's effectively the password. Delete stuff after a while so they have to re-login.
Feel free to hit me up on Keybase or whatever (details in my profile) if you want to follow up in detail.
