tterimaa/work-hours-backend

Express Typescript app starter template with passport.js authentication

Use this starter template for your express project that needs passport.js jwt authentication strategy and Typescript.

Forked from: https://github.com/zachgoll/express-jwt-authentication-starter

How to use this Repo

You can use this repo as a starter template for an Express app that needs passport.js jwt authentication and Typescript. This starter is especially suitable for Express.js backend that is connected to SPA frontend (React, Angular or similar). More information about the usage of passport.js can be found from the original repository.

You will need to start the Mongo DB database using the mongod process. You can run this process persistently in the background, but you could also just type mongod in your terminal.

Next, you will need to generate a public/private keypair. The .gitignore automatically ignores the private key. To generate the keypair run

npm run generateKeypair

Quickstart

Start the Express server in dev mode (http://localhost:3000)

npm run dev

Build the project for production use

npm run build

Run the production build (after building the project first)

npm start

Authentication flow

You can test the authentication with HTTP client of your preference, I use Postman. The app currently has three routes: /users/register, /users/login, /users/protected. You should be able to perform the following authentication flow:

1. POST /users/register with object

{
    "username": "your-username", 
    "password": "your-password" 
}

as the request body.

2. POST /users/login with the same object in the body as in the registration. You should get a response that contains field "token". Copy the token string starting with "Bearer..". Copy the token without the quotation marks.

3. GET /users/protected with your token attached to the Authorization header. You should get a response message "You are succesfully authenticated for this route!"

If you got successfully to phase 3, the app starter is working correctly and you can start building your app!