Building a Social Network with SwiftUI – Part 1 (Activity Feeds)

In this post, we'll be creating a simple social network with SwiftUI, called Stream Flutter, that allows a user to post messages to followers.

The app will allow a user to post a message to their followers and view updates from people they follow. Stream's Activity Feed API, combined with Swift, make it straightforward to build this sort of complex interaction. All source code for this application is available on GitHub. This application is fully functional on both iOS and Android.

To keep things focused, we'll be showing the more essential code snippets to get the idea of each part across. Often there is the context around those code snippets, which are necessary, such as layout or navigation. Please refer to the full source code if you're confused on how something works, or how we got to a screen. Each snippet will be accompanied by a comment explaining which files and lines it came from.

To build our social network, we'll need both a backend and a mobile application. Most of the work is done in the mobile app, but we need the backend to create frontend tokens for interacting with the Stream API securely.

For the backend, we'll rely on Express (Node.js) leveraging Stream's JavaScript library.

For the frontend, we'll build it with Swift wrapping Stream's Swift library, installed via cocoapods.

For a user to post an update, the app will perform these steps:

• The user types their name into our mobile application to log in.
• The mobile app registers the user with the backend and receives a Stream Activity Feed frontend token.
• User types in their message and hits "Post". The mobile app uses the Stream token to create a Stream activity and connects to Stream's REST API via the Swift library.
• User views their posts. The mobile app does this by retrieving its "user" feed via Stream.

If another user wants to follow a user and view their messages, the app goes through this process:

• Log in (same as above).
• The user navigates to the user list and selects a user to follow. The mobile app communicates with Stream API directly to create a follower relationship on their "timeline" feed.
• User views their timeline. The mobile app uses Stream API to retrieve their "timeline" feed, which is composed of all the messages from who they follow.

The code is split between the iOS mobile application contained in the ios directory, and the Express backend is in the backend directory. See the README.md in each folder to see installing and running instructions. If you'd like to follow along with running code, make sure you get both the backend and mobile app running before continuing.

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of Node.js (JavaScript), Swift, and SwiftUI is required to follow this tutorial. This code is intended to run locally on your machine with an internet connection.

If you'd like to follow along, you'll need an account with Stream. Please make sure you can run an iOS app. If you haven't done so, make sure you have XCode 11+ installed. If you're having issues building this project, feel free to open an issue on GitHub. If you're unfamiliar with SwiftUI, it may help to check out our SwiftUI Chat App tutorial before following along. The SwiftUI previews are unreliable at the time of this writing, so don't worry if they aren't working for you.

You also need to have the backend running. Please follow the instructions in the backend readme to see how to get it going.

Once you have an account with Stream, you need to set up a development app:

You also need to set up two flat Feeds, "user" and "timeline", in of stream:

You'll need to add the credentials from the Stream app to the source code for it to work and set up ngrok. See both the ios and backend readmes.

Let's get to building!

User Posts a Status Update

We'll start by allowing a user to post a status update, also known as an activity in Stream lingo.

Step 1: Login

To communicate with the Stream API, we need a secure frontend token that allows our mobile application to authenticate with Stream directly. This avoids having to proxy through the backend. To do this, we'll need a backend endpoint that uses our Stream account secrets to generate this token. Once we have this token, we don't need the backend to do anything else, since the mobile app has access to the full Stream API.

First, we'll be building the login screen which looks like this:

To start, let's layout our form in SwiftUI. In our ContentView, which is instantiated in SceneDelegate.swift:22 (seen below), we'll create a simple check to see if we're logged in, and show the login form if we're not:

// ios/TheStream/ContentView.swift:3
struct ContentView: View {
    @State var user = ""
    @EnvironmentObject var account: Account
    
    private func login() {
        account.login(user)
    }
    
    @ViewBuilder
    var body: some View {
        if account.isAuthed {
            // ...
        } else {
            VStack(alignment: .leading) {

We have a simple @State var that is bound to a TextField to store what the user types. When clicking "Login", we'll call our function .login which in turn calls @EnvironmentObject Account.login. This Account object is essentially a service object that contains our business logic and account data. For simplicity, this object will contain all business logic. In a real application, you'd likely want to split it up. The Account object is given in our SceneDelegate during the scene setup (in this case there's only 1 scene in our case, so it's effectively our application setup):

// ios/TheStream/SceneDelegate.swift:22
let contentView = ContentView().environmentObject(Account())

// Use a UIHostingController as window root view controller.
if let windowScene = scene as? UIWindowScene {
    let window = UIWindow(windowScene: windowScene)
    window.rootViewController = UIHostingController(rootView: contentView)
    self.window = window
    window.makeKeyAndVisible()
}

This instance is injected into our View via the @EnvironmentObject property wrapper. Now let's look at the implementation of Account.login:

func login(_ userToLogIn: String) {
    Alamofire
        .request("\(apiRoot)/v1/users",
            method: .post,
            parameters: ["user" : userToLogIn],
            encoding: JSONEncoding.default)
        .responseJSON { [weak self] response in
            print(response)
            let body = response.value as! NSDictionary
            let authToken = body["authToken"]! as! String
            
            
            self?.user = userToLogIn
            self?.authToken = authToken
            self?.setupFeed()
    }
}

Here we use AlamoFire to make an HTTP request to our backend to give us an auth token. We'll use this auth token to communicate with other API endpoints. The user registration endpoint in the backend simply stores the user in memory and generates a simple token for auth. This is not a real implementation and should be replaced by authentication and user management works for your application. Because of this, we won't go into detail here (please refer to the source code if you're interested).

Once we've stored the logged in user and auth token, we're ready to set up Stream Feed. The last line of .login calls .setupFeed:

private func setupFeed() {
    Alamofire
        .request("\(apiRoot)/v1/stream-feed-credentials",
            method: .post,
            headers: ["Authorization" : "Bearer \(authToken!)"])
        .responseJSON { [weak self] response in
            let body = response.value as! NSDictionary
            let feedToken = body["token"]! as! String
            let appId = body["appId"] as! String
            let apiKey = body["apiKey"] as! String
            
            if let user = self?.user {
                GetStream.Client.config = .init(apiKey: apiKey,
                                                appId: appId)
                

Once again, we use AlamoFire to send an HTTP request to our backend to get the Stream Feed Credentials. We use the auth token from before to authenticate the request. The response gives us our Stream frontend token so that we can interact with the Stream API directly, the Stream App ID, and Stream API Key. We use this data to initialize Stream Activity Feed Client. We also set our user up, so Stream knows what user is communicating with the API and store the feed token to authenticate further requests. The function finishes with storing references to two feeds that we'll use, the user feed and timeline feed. We'll see how these are used later. We then indicate that we're authed by setting .isAuthed which allows our view to know when we're ready to move on.

Let's look at the backend code:

// backend/src/controllers/v1/stream-feed-credentials/stream-feed-credentials.action.js:1
import dotenv from 'dotenv';
import stream from "getstream";

dotenv.config();

exports.streamFeedCredentials = async (req, res) => {
  try {
    const apiKey = process.env.STREAM_API_KEY;
    const apiSecret = process.env.STREAM_API_SECRET;
    const appId = process.env.STREAM_APP_ID;

    const client = stream.connect(apiKey, apiSecret, appId);

    await client.user(req.user).getOrCreate({ name: req.user });

This endpoint simply uses the stream library to create the user inside of Stream and generate a frontend token for use.

Now that we're logged in and authenticated with Stream, we're ready to post our first activity!

Step 2: Creating a Status Message

Now we'll build the form to post a status message to our Stream activity feed. First, we need to implement the navigation so we can get to our Profile page. We'll use a TabView to handle multiple screens:

// ios/TheStream/ContentView.swift:13
if account.isAuthed {
    TabView {
        TimelineView()
            .tabItem {
                Image(systemName: "list.dash")
                Text("Timeline")
        }
        ProfileView()
            .tabItem {
                Image(systemName: "person.fill")
                Text("Profile")
        }
        PeopleView()
            .tabItem {

We'll focus on ProfileView to start since this is where we create messages and view our activity feed. We'll need to build a form to create the users status update and a FeedView which shows all of our updates which looks like:

And here's the View code:

struct ProfileView: View {
    @State var message: String = ""
    @State var items: [FeedItem] = []
    @EnvironmentObject var account: Account
    
    var body: some View {
        VStack() {
            HStack() {
                TextField("Say something...", text: $message, onCommit: createFeedItem)
                Button(action: createFeedItem) { Text("Send") }
            }.padding()
            FeedView(items: items)
        }.onAppear(perform: fetch)
    }
    

This view has two @State properties, which contain the message we want to send and a list of our previous feed items (previously sent items). First, we bind message to a TextField and call to up account.createFeedItem action when the users submits:

// ios/TheStream/Account.swift:55
func createFeedItem(_ message: String, completion: @escaping () -> Void) {
    let activity = FeedItem(actor: User(id: self.user!), verb: "post", object: UUID().uuidString, message: message)
    
    userFeed?.add(activity) { result in
        completion()
    }
}

This creates a FeedItem and adds that to the userFeed set up during Account.login. FeedItem is a simple data object which serializes our data for Stream correctly:

// ios/TheStream/FeedItem.swift
final class FeedItem: EnrichedActivity<GetStream.User, String, DefaultReaction>, Identifiable {
    private enum CodingKeys: String, CodingKey {
        case message
    }
    
    var message: String
    
    init(actor: GetStream.User, verb: Verb, object: ObjectType, message: String) {
        self.message = message
        super.init(actor: actor, verb: verb, object: object)
    }
    
    required init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
        let container = try decoder.container(keyedBy: CodingKeys.self)

This looks complicated, but it's merely a class declaring that we have a Stream Activity which contains a user and a message. This class tells the Stream library how to serialize and deserialize our activity, which includes a String message.

Once we've sent this message to stream, we call the given completion to indicate success, which in our ProfileView calls a fetch. We also do this fetch when the View first loads via .onAppear to load the initial feed. Let's see the implementation of Account.fetchFeed(.profile):

// ios/TheStream/Account.swift:40
func fetchFeed(_ feedType: FeedType, completion: @escaping (_ result: [FeedItem]) -> Void) {
    let feed: FlatFeed = {
        switch(feedType) {
        case .profile:
            return userFeed!
        case .timeline:
            return timelineFeed!
        }
    }()
    
    feed.get(typeOf: FeedItem.self, pagination: .limit(50)) { r in
        completion(try! r.get().results)
    }
}

We find the correct feed to use and return the last 50 items from that feed and pass it back via our completion. In the View we pass those items to the FeedView:

// ios/TheStream/FeedView.swift:6
struct FeedView: View {
    var items: [FeedItem]
    
    var body: some View {
        List {
            ForEach(items) { item in
                FeedRow(item: item)
            }
        }
    }
}

This is a simple List which uses FeedRow:

struct FeedRow: View {
    var item: FeedItem
    
    var body: some View {
        VStack(alignment: .leading) {
            Text(item.message)
                .font(.headline)
            Text(item.actor.id)
                .font(.caption)
        }.frame(minWidth: 0, maxWidth: .infinity, minHeight: 0, maxHeight: .infinity, alignment: .topLeading)
    }
}

The FeedRow simply displays the message and author. With all of those pieces put together, we can now see our messages:

Next, we'll see how to follow multiple users via a timeline feed and see all of their messages.

User Timeline

Now that users can post messages, we'd like to follow a few and see a combined feed of all the messages for users we follow.

Step 1: Follow a User

The first thing we need to do is view a list of users and pick a few to follow. We'll start by creating a view that shows all the users and lets a user follow a few. Here is the screen that shows all the users:

And here's the code that backs it:

// ios/TheStream/PeopleView.swift:3
struct PeopleView: View {
    @EnvironmentObject var account: Account
    @State var users: [String] = []
    @State var showFollowedAlert: Bool = false
    @State var tag: Int? = nil
    
    var body: some View {
        List {
            ForEach(users.indices, id: \.self) { i in
                HStack() {
                    Text(self.users[i])
                    Spacer()
                    Image(systemName: "plus.circle").onTapGesture {
                        self.account.follow(self.users[i]) {

This SwiftUI View is a List that shows the user and a button to follow. When the user clicks follow, we tell the account to follow that user and show an Alert. The initial onAppear fetch is a simple HTTP call to our backend to get the list of users that have registered. Since this is not a real implementation, we won't delve into it here. Please refer to the source if you're curious. Let's look at Account.follow to see how we tell Stream to create a follower relationship:

func follow(_ user: String, completion: @escaping () -> Void) {
    timelineFeed!.follow(
        toTarget: Client.shared.flatFeed(feedSlug: "user", userId: user).feedId
    ) { result in
        completion()
    }
}

Since we set our timelineFeed up during Account.login, we simply use that feed object to do the work. We're adding a follow relationship to another user's "user" feed to this user's "timeline" feed. All this means is anytime another user posts to their "user" feed (implemented in the first part). We'll see it on our "timeline" feed since our feed now follows theirs. The cool part is, we can add any number of users feeds to our "timeline" feed, and Stream will return a well-ordered list of activities.

If you don't see anyone in your user list, this is likely because you only have one user registered. Make sure you restart the application and log in/register as a different user.

Step 2: View Timeline

Now that we have a way to follow users, we can view our timeline:

Let's look at the code to display our timeline:

// ios/TheStream/TimelineView.swift:3
struct TimelineView: View {
    @State var items: [FeedItem] = []
    @EnvironmentObject var account: Account
    
    var body: some View {
        FeedView(items: items)
            .onAppear(perform: fetch)
    }
    
    private func fetch() {
        account.fetchFeed(.timeline) { items in
            self.items = items
        }
    }
}

The cool thing is since we already built our FeedView for our ProfileView, we're done. We simply fetch the .timeline feed items and display them with the FeedView.

And that's it! We now have a fully functioning mini social network.