activedirectoryuserobject

Middleware to create a user object on req via data fetched from active directory.

Installation

npm install activedirectoryuserobject --save

Explanation

This middleware allows you to dynamically build a user object based on details fetched from active directory.

You need to ensure that a username is set on the request before this middleware in the middleware chain. If you are running on iis server via iisnode, you can add iisuser to your middleware chain before activedirectoryuserobject to have this done for you.

You can then configure the name of the username property on the request. (See below for more details)

Basic example usage

const config = {
  url: 'ldap://mediasuite.local',
  baseDN: 'dc=mediasuite, dc=local',
  username: '[e-mail]',
  password: 'password'
}
const options = {
  properties: {
    groups: {values: ['group 1', 'group 2', 'group 3']}
  }
}
 
app.use((req, res, next) => {
  //get username from somewhere and set on the request
  req.username = 'jsmith'
  next()
})
app.use(activedirectoryuserobject(config, options))

Assuming that the active directory lookup found that user jsmith belonged to several groups one of which was group 1, after this middleware has run, a user object will be set on the request that looks something like:

//req.user
{
  name: 'jsmith',
  groups: ['group 1']
}

Configuration

The first parameter to activedirectoryuserobject object is an activedirectory connection configuration object. It accepts 4 properties, all of which are compulsory.

const config = {
  url: 'ldap://mediasuite.local',
  baseDN: 'dc=mediasuite, dc=local',
  username: '[e-mail]',
  password: 'password'
}

Options

The second parameter to activedirectoryuserobject is an options object. This allows you to configure what groups get looked up in activedirectory for a user, where to find the username on the request, what to call the key for the object that will be set on the request by activedirectoryuserobject and so on.

userName

You can specify which property on the request activedirectoryuserobject should use to look for the username as follows:

const options = {
  userName: 'user'
}

This value defaults to username

userObject

You can specify which property should be created on the request to hold the created user object as follows:

const options = {
  userObject: 'userObject'
}

This value defaults to user

userObjectName

You can specify what the user name property will be called on the user object as follows:

const options = {
  userObjectName: 'username'
}

This value defaults to name

customParseFunction

By default, the common name (cn) will be parsed out of active directory results and used.

Eg. For each result in an array of activedirectory results, we grab the cn and throw away the rest.

[{
  dn: 'CN=Group 2,CN=Users,DC=mediasuite,DC=local',
  cn: 'group 2'
},
...
]

For other requirements, you can use customParseFunction to set a parsing function that will be called for each result returned from activedirectory. This function will be passed the whole result record and you should simply return a value as desired.

Eg.

const options = {
  userObjectName: obj => obj.dn
}

Properties

The properties key allows you to set up any number of keyed groups for the user along with values to match on.

A good example use case is roles. Perhaps you have a set of roles your application cares about such as manager, admin and editor. You could create a properties key called roles with values ['manager', 'admin', 'editor'] then if the user being checked belongs to the activedirectory group editor and writer only the group editor will be used in the final user object as one of the user's roles.

In the following example, the key groups will be created, an activedirectory group query will be performed for the user and any groups found that match the values in the array values will be included.

const options = {
  properties: {
    groups: {values: ['group 1', 'group 2', 'group 3']}
  }
}

So if in active directory the user belonged to groups group 1 and group 5 then the final object would look like:

{
  name: 'jsmith',
  groups: ['group 1']
}

Single values instead of array

If are only looking to get back a single value, we can specify array: false in our configuration as follows.

const options = {
  properties: {
    groups: {
      values: ['group 1', 'group 2', 'group 3'],
      array: false
    }
  }
}

And the resulting object will look like:

{
  name: 'jsmith',
  groups: 'group 1'
}

Note, the groups value in the above example will be the first matching group.

Getting all activedirectory groups

If you need all activedirectory groups to be returned, you can specify values: 'all' instead of an array of possible values as follows.

const options = {
  properties: {
    groups: {
      values: 'all'
    }
  }
}

And the resulting object will look something like:

{
  name: 'jsmith',
  groups: ['group 1'. 'group 2', 'group 3']
}

Caching

activedirectoryuserobject supports caching of user objects so that activedirectory is not hit on every request via a simple memory cache that will be wiped if you restart the server. Caching is disabled by default but can be enabled with the following options:

const options = {
  useCache: true, // default false
  ttl: 1000 // in milliseconds
}

Debugging

activedirectoryuserobject can output debugging information if desired. To turn debugging on use the environment variable DEBUG=activedirectoryuserobject On windows this can be set from the console like so:

set DEBUG=activedirectoryuserobject