authonice (nodejs)

IN PROGRESS: not ready, yet

This is the authonice backend for nodejs, mongoose & express.

authonice is a platform/language/framework agnostic ecosystem for web-app authentication, with lots of inspiration from satellizer.

It's designed to work with lots of backend languages, auth services, & frontend frameworks. It's goal is to make you super-happy because your sites are safe, easy to setup & maintain, and stylishly locked-down in your language/frameworks of choice.

If we don't have a module for the frontend-framework/backend-language/auth-service you want to support, ask us or contribute!

You can see a demo of this in-use, here

installation

npm install authonice

usage

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var mongoose = require('mongoose');
mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/quickstart');
var authonice = require('authonice');
var Email = require('mongoose-type-email');

// Your User model with the default fields
var UserSchema = new mongoose.Schema({
    email: {type: Email, required:true, unique:true},
    password: {type: String, required:true},
    verify: {type:String, default:null}
});
UserSchema.plugin(require('mongoose-bcrypt'));
var User = module.exports = mongoose.model('User', UserSchema);

// mount auth endpoints at /auth
app.use('/auth', authonice.middleware(User));

// lock down your secret API
app.get('/secret', authonice, function(req, res){
  // you have access to req.user here
  res.send('cool!');
});

// serve up whatever your frontend is
app.use(express.static('./public'));

app.listen(3000);

options

authonice.middleware has a second parameter that looks like this:

{
  // Your secret token key.
  // default: pseudo-random
  secret: 'kittykat0nkeybo04rD',

  // Called when a user registers. Use it to email them.
  // default: console.log, so you can manually verify
  verifyCallback: function(user, code){}
}

If you don't set secret, it will change on every server-reboot, so issued tokens will all be invalid.

HTTPS

PROTIP: Make sure that you use HTTPS, in production, on your auth endpoints, so users aren't sending their credentials plaintext.

Instead of using app.listen(3000) (HTTP) it's highly recommended that you use HTTPS. Here is how you would do that:

var fs = require('fs');
var https = require('https');

var credentials = {
  key: fs.readFileSync('sslcert/server.key', 'utf8'),
  cert: fs.readFileSync('sslcert/server.crt', 'utf8')
};

https.createServer(credentials, app).listen(443);

On PAAS like heroku, often you will get put behind a HTTPS proxy, so your users are safe, but it will serve both HTTP & HTTPS. You can help users to use HTTPS on your whole site, by putting this before all other app stuff:

app.get('*', function(req,res,next){
  if(req.headers['x-forwarded-proto']!='https'){
    res.redirect('https://mypreferreddomain.com'+req.url);
  }else{
    next();
  } 
});

endpoints

If you mounted your endpoint at /auth (above) you will get these REST endpoints:

• POST /auth/login - login with vars email & password, receive an auth token
• POST /auth/register - register a new user, send verification email
• GET /auth/verify/:code - verify a user, based on an email they received
• POST /auth/resend - resend verification email (requires email in vars)
• GET /auth/user (LOCKED) - send user object
• GET /auth/token (LOCKED) - fast token-check, sends OK

All the frontends should support these, once you tell them the endpoint (in the above examples, /auth)

next steps

• Go get a frontend module to give your app a face.
• Add some services so you can accept logins authentication from social networks and things.