cookie-auth

This module does one thing very simply, and that's let your node process authenticate using cookies. Great for CLI/REST clients.

installation

npm install cookie-auth

API

var auth = require('cookie-auth')(opts)

opts properties:

• authenticator - required - the authentication handler (see below)
• name - the name of the session token key in the cookies (defaults to session)
• sessions - a levelup instance to store sessions in. defaults to memdb. note that expiry/ttl is not handled by default

You must pass in your own 'authenticator' function that looks like this:

function authenticator(req, res, cb) {
  // do auth with req, res and call cb when done
  
  doSomeAuthThing(req, res, function(err) {
    // e.g. if not authorized
    cb(err)
  
    // otherwise, if authorized
    cb()
  })
}

auth.login(res, cb)

creates a new session and sets a cookie on res, and calls cb when done with (err, data) where err is any error from the session store .put and data is the session response data (see below).

auth.logout(req, res, cb)

deletes the session from the session store (using auth.delete) and sets a set-cookie to delete the cookie on res. calls the optional cb when done with no arguments

auth.delete(req, cb)

deletes the session from the session store calls cb when done with (err) if an error occured with the store.del call

auth.handle(req, res, cb)

looks up the session for req and if it is already valid calls cb. If no session exists then the authenticator will be attempted. If authentication is successful then auth.login gets called with cb.

response data

for valid sessions the following data is returned to the cb as the second argument (for both login and handle):

{session: <session-id-string>, created: <created-at-ISO-8601-date-string>}

e.g.

{session: "b7c91436a316ef5b189467b9898d21e6", created: "2015-01-01T21:59:04.844Z"}

in the case of an error cb will be called with the Error as the first argument.

Usage

Here is an example of using the basic module from npm to do HTTP Basic Authentication:

var Auth = require('cookie-auth')
var basic = require('basic')
 
// set up server and router code...
 
var basicAuthenticator = basic(function (user, pass, callback) {
  if (user === 'test' && pass === 'pass') return callback(null)
  callback(new Error("Access Denied"))
})
  
var auth = Auth({
  name: 'my-application',
  authenticator: basicAuthenticator
})
 
router.addRoute('/login', function (req, res) {
  var self = this
  auth.handle(req, res, function(err, session) {
    if (err) return auth.logout(req, res)
    res.end(JSON.stringify(session))
  })
});
 
router.addRoute('/logout', function (req, res) {
  return auth.logout(req, res)
})