Schibsted account SDK for browsers

Welcome! This is the home of the Schibsted account JavaScript SDK for use by any website that wishes to use Schibsted account to sign up and log in users. Use it to generate URLs for your site's "Log in" button, query the logged-in status of your users, and to check whether they have access to products and subscriptions, etc.

Getting started

This sdk mainly communicates with a service named Session Service, which is available on brand domains (i.e. id.vg.no) to avoid Third-Party Cookie request.

Since browsers started to block Third-Party Cookies, your top domain from local machine needs to match your Session Service top domain. Otherwise, the Session Service cookie will be a third-party cookie and will not be sent with a XHR request.

The same applies to cross scheme requests. The Session Service is hosted on https and therefore you need to run your site with HTTPS locally.

For example if your pre domain is pre.sdk-example.com, and it uses id.pre.sdk-example.com Session Service domain, your local domain should be local.sdk-example.com.

1. Do npm install --save @schibsted/account-sdk-browser
2. Use this library as you would any other npm module: import { Identity, Monetization, Payment } from '@schibsted/account-sdk-browser' With CommonJS it is possible to require the modules Identity, Monetization and Payment by appending /identity, /monetization' or /payment'.
3. Build your site as you prefer. This library uses modern JavaScript syntax (including async/await and other ES2017 and WHATWG features) by default. We recommend that you do any transpilation yourself for the browser versions you need to cater to. See this paragraph for info about our Babel-ified version and info about polyfills.
4. Initiate the SDK and provide at least clientId, env and sessionDomain.

If this is for a new site and there is no sessionDomain yet, contact support to initiate the process.

Migration to 5.x.x (ITP)

Follow the migration guide.

Simplified login widget

1. Ensure that your site has no site specific terms and conditions in the Schibsted account login flow.
2. Define rules for when and how often the simplified login prompt should be shown to unique users on your site. How you do this is up to you, but we recommend starting with showing the prompt once per user before potentially increasing this frequency over time.
3. Set up a function to check if users landing on your domain is logged in to your site.
4. If the user is not logged-in to your site, call the showSimplifiedLoginWidget function. The showSimplifiedLoginWidget accepts the same params as login function (state is required, it might be string or async function). If the simplified login prompt is to be loaded, showSimplifiedLoginWidget will return true.
5. Set up a way to store information about which users have been shown the simplified login prompt. How you do this is up to you, but one way is to use localStorage. Use this information to execute on the rules defined in #2.

Example project

There is an example that demonstrates how the SDK can be used. The code is here, and you can see it live here. You have a use-case that we haven't thought of? Ask us to add it by creating an issue.

You can use that code as inspiration or just fork and play with it. The account-sdk-browser NPM module is used for authenticating the user with Schibsted account. Take a look at how the SDK is initialized.

When a user wants to log in to your site, you direct them to a UI flow that is hosted by Schibsted Account. We authenticate the user and redirect them back to your site. This final redirect back to your site is done in accordance with the OAuth2 spec. That means that we pass a code in the query string in that redirect uri. You can use that code on your site backend along with your client credentials (client id & secret) to get an Access Token (AT) and Refresh Token (RT). You don't send the AT (and never ever the RT!) to the browser but rather keep it on the server side and associate it with that particular user session in order to be able to call Schibsted account APIs on behalf of that user.

Events

The SDK fires events when something we deem interesting is happening. For example the Identity class emits some events when the user is logged in or logged out. This SDK uses a familar interface that's very similar to Node's EventEmitter. The most important methods are .on(eventName, listener) (to subscribe to an event) and .off(eventName, listener) (to unsubscribe to an event).

Identity

Let's start with a bit of example code:

Example

import { Identity } from '@schibsted/account-sdk-browser'

const identity = new Identity({
    clientId: '56e9a5d1eee0000000000000',
    redirectUri: 'https://awesomenews.site', // ensure it's listed in selfservice
    env: 'PRE', // Schibsted account env. A url or a special key: 'PRE', 'PRO', 'PRO_NO', 'PRO_FI' or 'PRO_DK'
    sessionDomain: 'https://id.awesomenews.site', // client-configured session-service domain
})

async function whenSiteLoaded() {
    const loginContainer = document.getElementById('login-container')
    if (await identity.isLoggedIn()) {
        const user = await identity.getUser()
        const span = document.createElement('span')
        span.textContent = `Hello ${user.givenName}`
        loginContainer.appendChild(span)
    } else {
        loginContainer.innerHTML = '<button class="login-button">Log in</button>'
    }
}

function userClicksLogIn() {
    identity.login({ state: 'some-random-string-1234-foobar-wonky-pig' })
}

Regarding state

This parameter is an OpenID Connect parameter (described in this paragraph in the spec). It's formatted as an opaque string. This means you can send anything that can be serialized to a string. In practice, we have good experience sending something like a JSON value like a base64-url-encoded value — it's just an easy way to avoid browsers or backends messing with special characters.

But as a trivial example, if you call Identity.login(..) with params redirectUri=https://site.com&state=article%3D1234 — then at the end of the authentication flow, the user will be sent back to your redirectUri, and the state parameter will be forwarded along with the auth code parameter.

It is recommended that you provide a unique identifier as part of the state, to prevent CSRF attacks. For example this can be accomplished by:

1. Your backend generates random token: 1234abcd, saves it in some tokenCache, and forwards to your browser frontend
2. Your frontend calls Identity.login with state = base64Urlencode({ token: '1234abcd', article: '1234', ... })
3. When auth flow completes, the user is redirected back to your site. Then, your backend sees the query parameters code (which it can exchange for OAuth tokens for the user) and state
4. Your backend can do decodedState = base64Urldecode(query.state) and then verify that its tokenCache.contains(decodedState.token). If that fails, then possibly a CSRF attack was attempted. If successful, remove the token from the tokenCache so the same token can't be used again, and continue to show decodedState.article

Authentication methods

Although Schibsted account abstracts away the details of how the users sign up or log in, it's worth mentioning that your end users have a few ways to log in:

• Username & password: pretty self-explanatory; users register using an email address and a self-chosen password
• Passwordless - email: here, the users enter their email address and receive a one-time code that they can use to log in
• Multifactor authentication: first client indicates which methods should be preferred, later these will be included (if fulfilled) in AMR claim of IDToken

The default is username & password. If you wish to use one of the passwordless login methods, the login() function takes an optional parameter called acrValues (Authentication Context Class Reference). The acrValues parameter with multifactor authentication can take following values:

• eid - authentication using BankID (for DEV and PRE environments you can choose between country specific solution by specifying eid-no or eid-se instead)
• otp-email - passwordless authentication using code sent to registered email
• password - force password authentication (even if user is already logged in)
• otp - authentication using registered one time code generator (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6238)
• sms - authentication using SMS code sent to phone number
• password otp sms - those authentication methods might be combined

The classic way to authenticate a user, is to send them from your site to the Schibsted account domain, let the user authenticate there, and then have us redirect them back to your site. If you prefer, we also provide a popup that you can use. In this method, the authentication happens on a separate popup window and at the end of the auth flow. We recommend that you make the popup send a signal to your main page — using postMessage or something similar — to indicate that the user is logged in. If the popup window fails to open, it'll automatically fall back to the redirect flow. The SDK Example project mentioned above demonstrates how it can work. Again, you can see sdk-example if you want a working example.

Is the user logged in?

Schibsted account relies on browser cookies to determine whether a user is recognized as logged in. The SDK provides functions that can be used to check if the user that's visiting your site is already a Schibsted user or not.

• Identity#isLoggedIn tells you if the user that is visiting your site is already logged in to Schibsted account or not.
• Identity#isConnected tells you if the user is connected to your client. A user might have isLoggedIn=true and at the same time isConnected=false if they have logged in to Schibsted account, but not accepted terms and privacy policy for your site.

If you've lately changed your terms & conditions, maybe the user still hasn't accepted them. In that case they are considered not connected. In that case, if they click "Log in" from your site, we will just ask them to accept those terms and redirect them right back to your site.

Logging out

If you want to log the user out of Schibsted account, you can call Identity#logout. This will remove the Schibsted account brand session. User will still be logged into Schibsted account.

Monetization

The preferred method for checking whether a user has access to a product/subscription is Monetization#hasAccess. It requires using Session Service, and supports both Schibsted account productId's and Zuora feature id's.

Example

import { Monetization } from '@schibsted/account-sdk-browser'

const monetization = new Monetization({
    clientId: '56e9a5d1eee0000000000000',
    redirectUri: 'https://awesomenews.site', // ensure it's listed in selfservice
    sessionDomain: 'https://id.aweseome.site', // client-configured session-service domain
    env: 'PRE', // Schibsted account env. A url or a special key: 'PRE', 'PRO' or 'PRO_NO'
});

try {
    // Check if the user has access to a a particular product
    const userId = await identity.getUserId();
    const data = await monetization.hasAccess([productId], userId);
    alert(`User has access to ${productId}? ${data.entitled}`)
} catch (err) {
    alert(`Could not query if the user has access to ${productId} because ${err}`)
}

Payment

This class provides methods for paying with a so-called paylink, buying a product, getting links to pages for redeeming voucher codes, reviewing payment history, and more.

Example

import { Payment } from '@schibsted/account-sdk-browser'

const paymentSDK = new Payment({
    clientId: '56e9a5d1eee0000000000000',
    redirectUri: 'https://awesomenews.site', // ensure it's listed in selfservice
    env: 'PRE', // Schibsted account env. A url or a special key: 'PRE', 'PRO' or 'PRO_NO'
})

// Get the url to paymentSDK with paylink
const paylink = '...'
const paylinkUrl = paymentSDK.purchasePaylinkUrl(paylink)

// Or another example --- pay with paylink in a popup
paymentSDK.payWithPaylink(paylink)

Appendix

Polyfills

This SDK uses modern JavaScript features. If you support older browsers, you should use a tool like babel to transform the JavaScript as needed. However, since certain teams have deployment pipelines where it's difficult to do their own transpilation, we do provide some opt-in es5 files as well:

1. @schibsted/account-sdk-browser/es5: Include both Identity, Monetization and Payment.
2. @schibsted/account-sdk-browser/es5/global: Include both Identity, Monetization and Payment. In addition, add them as variables to the global window object.
3. @schibsted/account-sdk-browser/es5/identity, @schibsted/account-sdk-browser/es5/monetization or @schibsted/account-sdk-browser/es5/payment can be used to only include each class by itself.

But then regardless of whether you use the es5 versions or not, you might need to polyfill certain things that might be missing in the browsers you wish to support. A quick test using IE11 showed that we needed polyfills for Promise, URL, Object.entries, fetch, Number.isFinite and Number.isInteger.

Cookies

There are some cookies used by Schibsted account. They should all be considered opaque on the browser side. Nevertheless, here is a short description of them.

1. The autologin cookie (often called 'the remember-me-cookie'): The cookie name in the production environments is vgs_email, because reasons (on PRE, it is called spid-pre-data). It's a JSON string that's encoded using the standard encodeURIComponent() function and is an object that contains two pieces of information that's important:
   • remember: if set to true, the user chose to be remembered and this means we usually support auto-login (that is, if you call the Schibsted account hassession service, and no session can be found in the session database, it will automatically create a new one for the user so that they don't have to authenticate again. If it is false, it should be interpreted as the user does not want to be automatically logged in to any site when their session expires
   • v: the version number
2. The session cookies: Cookie names in production environments are identity, and SPID_SE or SPID_NO. It contains:
   • user: an object (if it's missing, a call to hassession will return a 401 with a UserException that says No session found)
     • userId identifies the user. We use this property to compare "old" user with "new" user and fire events that indicate that the user has changed
     • is_logged_in indicates if the user is logged in
   • user_tags: a map that contains some flags about the user; namely:
     • is_logged_in indicates if the user is logged in (this seems to be a duplicate of a property with a similar name in the parent user object)
     • terms: a map of term ids that indicate if they've been accepted by the user.
   • referer (yep, missing the double "rr"..): If this is missing, a call to hassession will return a 401 with a UserException that says No session found.

Releasing

Tags are pushed to NPM via Travis. To release a new version, run in master

$ npm version <major|minor|patch>

which will run the test, update version in package.json, commit, tag the commit and push.

LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2024 Schibsted Products & Technology AS

Licensed under the MIT License

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.