victoria-kaihe/boilerplate-local-jwt-auth

React/Redux client consuming an Express server with Passport local auth using JWTs

This demonstrates a fairly minimal username/password auth scenario that makes use of libsodium/Argon2i password hashing. There's also a tiny API to show how JWTs might be used to secure it.

Setup

npm i
mv .env.example .env
npm start

• A postinstall script will run a knex migration that creates a users table.
• Go to http://localhost:3000 to see the site.

Deploying to Heroku

The database migration doesn't run automatically in postinstall on production builds, so you'll need to invoke it manually. Always a good idea to make sure you don't accidentally nuke your production database!

heroku login
heroku create
heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev
heroku run npm run migrate:prod

More information

The session and JWT secrets are loaded from environment variables.

Password hashing modules often have a native component: they're written in lower-level languages like C or C++ with a JavaScript wrapper. This means they can be trickier to install on some platforms. There are some instructions for how to obtain the necessary tools to build native modules here. If you're using a Mac, be sure you have XCode and Homebrew installed and run brew install libtool autoconf automake.

To use the API, you'll first need to register a user with the web form. Then hit the https://localhost:3000/api/v1/authenticate endpoint with a POST request containing something like:

{ 
  "username": "foo",
  "password": "bar"
}

The server should respond with a token. You can use this token in subsequent requests. You'll need to send an Authorization header:

curl -k -H "Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpZCI6OCwidXNlcm5hbWUiOiJub2RleSIsImlhdCI6MTQ4NTM5NDc3MCwiZXhwIjoxNDg1NDgxMTcwfQ.EVo65RYtRlA9HTOiIqaG_aDfSE7xMedbr7JMeDlt5kE" \
  https://localhost:3000/api/v1/quote

Notice the space between Bearer and the token. Compare the response to requests with the token and without it.

Things to think about

This demo omits plenty of things that a production system would have to care about. For example, how could we better validate the registration form? Right now a user can be created with username ' ' and password ' ': hardly ideal!

Also, because the credentials are passed to the server in clear text, this should ONLY happen over SSL/HTTPS in production.