ambassador

ambassador is Express-compatible authentication middleware for Node.js, featuring JS Object Delegation and full support for ES6 modules.

ambassador manages authentication. The primary concept is that ambassador assists in utilizing third-party services to log users in and out of the designated application. ambassador does not mount routes or assume any particular database schema, allowing a great deal of flexibility in terms of implementation. As the developer, you determine how to manage user and session data; ambassador simply negotiates the exchange of authentication codes for access tokens via OAuth 1.0/2.0 emissaries, and provides the means to retrieve user data from the OAuth source. Currently, ambassador handles authentication via the OAuth2 protocol, with ambassadors to handle authentication through Discord and generic OAuth 2.0. More ambassadors will be added in the future.

Install

$ npm install @nonsensecodes/ambassador

Usage

Strategies

Before authenticating requests, the strategy (or strategies) used by an application must be configured. This is done by passing OAuth2 credentials to the OAuth2 strategy. The strategy can then be called to handle authentication:

import { ambassador, OAuth2Strategy } from '@nonsensecodes/ambassador';

OAuth2Strategy.build({
  clientID: client_id,
  clientSecret: client_secret,
  authorizeURL: url,
  accessTokenURL: url,
  callbackURL: callback
});

ambassador.use(OAuth2Strategy, function verify());

Sessions

ambassador will maintain persistent login sessions. In order for persistent sessions to work, the authenticated user must be serialized to the session, and deserialized when subsequent requests are made. ambassador does not impose any restrictions on how your user records are stored. Instead, you provide functions to ambassador which implements the necessary serialization and deserialization logic. In a typical application, this will be as simple as serializing the user ID, and finding the user by ID when deserializing.

ambassador.serializeUser(function(user, done) {
  done(null, user.id);
});

ambassador.deserializeUser(function(id, done) {
  User.findById(id, function (err, user) {
    done(err, user);
  });
});

Middleware

To use ambassador in an Express or Connect-based application, configure it with the required ambassador.initialize() middleware. If your application uses persistent login sessions (recommended, but not required), ambassador.session() middleware must also be used.

var app = express();
app.use(require('serve-static')(__dirname + '/../../public'));
app.use(require('cookie-parser')());
app.use(require('body-parser').urlencoded({ extended: true }));
app.use(require('express-session')({ secret: 'keyboard cat', resave: true, saveUninitialized: true }));
app.use(ambassador.initialize());
app.use(ambassador.session());

Authenticate Requests

ambassador provides an authenticate() function, which is used as route middleware to authenticate requests.

app.post('/login', 
  ambassador.authenticate('oauth2', { failureRedirect: '/login' }),
  function(req, res) {
    res.redirect('/');
  });

License

ambassador: your OAuth2 authentication negotiator
Copyright (C) 2020 Joshua Alexander Castaneda

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

This software is based on:
Passport
The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2011-2019 Jared Hanson <http://jaredhanson.net/>