Auth Starter

This is the authentication code I find myself implementing on every project that needs a basic password protected demo or admin site. The flexibility of passport is nice, but for a simple app with few users all you need is something that works with minimal effort.

• Express 3
• Based on passport-local
• Username/password stored in mongodb
• Limit unsuccessful login attempts (3 per minute by default)
• Password hashing
• Users cached in memory to avoid excessive db requests
• Redirection to original url
• Hash preserved in redirection urls
• Default login form provided if not overridden by creating views/login.jshtml

The following routes are added to the app:

• GET /login
• POST /login
• GET /logout
• GET /loginredirect

Installation

npm install authstarter

To create necessary auth related view files, run

node
require("authstarter").setup();

Usage

var partials = require('express-partials');
var AuthStarter = require("authstarter");

var app = express();

app.use(partials());

app.configure(function() {
    app.use(express.cookieParser());
    app.use(express.session({
        secret: 'secret'
    }));
    app.use(express.bodyParser());

    AuthStarter.configure(app);
    app.use(app.router);
    app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/static'));
    app.engine('jshtml', require('jshtml-express'));
    app.set('view engine', 'jshtml');
});


app.get('/', AuthStarter.ensureAuthenticated, function(req, res) {
    req.send('Secured content');
});

User setup

The user store is a mongodb collection containing documents like:

{
  _id: ObjectId("537159a186915c696a000521"),
  username: "username",
  password: "password",
  roles: {
    admin: false
  }
}

Passwords may be either plain text or hashed in the format used by https://github.com/davidwood/node-password-hash

Users may be created manually or using one of the provided functions that include password hashing.

AuthStarter.addUser("username", "password", {"user": true, "admin":false});

AuthStarter.setPassword(username, password);

Options

var settings = {
    mongoUrl: process.env.MONGOHQ_URL,
    baseUrl: process.env.SECURE_DOMAIN,
    userCollection: process.env.USER_COLLECTION || 'AdminUsers',
    hashOptions: {
        algorithm: "sha512"
    },
    maxAttempts: 3,
    layout: "blanklayout",
    title: "Log In",
    customCss: ""
};

AuthStarter.configure(app, settings);

• mongoUrl - a mongodb url as used by mongo-native
• baseUrl - used to make redirects absolute. eg "https://example.com"
• userCollection - name of the mongodb collection
• hashOptions - as used by password-hash
• maxAttempts - number of incorrect login attempts allowed within one minute