Cred Auth Manager

An Express-based centralized auth management system for handling user accounts and setting their permissions to be used across multiple independent resource APIs by exchanging JSON Web Tokens for valid cred(entials).

Huh?

All apps need some concept of "users", and those users usually have some method of "logging in" (exchanging credentials for application-specific access tokens), and each user may (or may not) have disparate permissions (e.g., an admin user might have more power than a regular user). This package abstracts these problems away from your app so you don't have to worry about them. Just make your app-specific stuff, and let cred-auth-manager handle user accounts and auth.

You can also do stuff like group users together into categories/labels and enable users' management of friendships/relationships from themselves to other users in the system. It's up to you what you'd like to do with that (or not use it at all).

Authorization is per-resource. So you have controls that can enable you to use a single installation of cred-auth-manager handle auth for multiple different apps that you are developing so you can have all your user-stuff in one place. Or you can install it alongside (or inside) each of your apps if you want each of your apps to have its own set of user-stuff.

It includes a graphical user interface, made with React, to administer the database and adjust settings for your app(s).

The server itself has no front-end. It is a simple JSON API. But the React app accesses its interface and enables a UI for changing settings. Your customer-facing apps can access the API in the same way this React app does using the JSON API to login, get tokens, and manage settings.

Why?

I'm always needing to do the same things over and over in every app I make: dealing with users, their accounts, how they login, what permissions they have, what they have access to do (or not do), and grouping them together in different ways. cred-auth-manager just abstracts these problems into a single package that I can depend on using revisions such that all my apps can be upgraded together when I want to change/fix/upgrade aspects of my user-management flow.

This is a toolbox to help give your apps powerful auth tools. It's not meant to be the right solution for all situations. It's a certain type of solution that may be useful to the way you're working.

Install

You can use cred-auth-manager in three different ways:

1. Make a new app and include cred-auth-manager inside it.
2. Make a mini app that simply launches cred-auth-manager beside your app.
3. Run it as a Docker container micro-service on its own.

npm install cred-auth-manager

Usage

NPM Module

const express = require('express')
const createApp = require('cred-auth-manager')

const app = createApp({
  express,
  issuer: 'my-app-name',
  database: 'postgres://localhost:5432/my-db-name',
  accessPrivKey: '/path/to/private/key',
  accessPubKey: '/path/to/public/key',
  refreshSecret: 'my_super_secret_secret'
})

app.use('/custom/path', (req, res, next) => {
  res.json({
    ok: true,
    message: 'It worked!'
  })
})

app.listen(3000, err => {
  if (err) return console.log('ERROR: ', err)

  console.log('Server started on port 3000')
})

Docker Container

...documentation coming soon

License

MIT

Acknowledgements

Cred