feathers-authentication-local

Local authentication strategy for feathers-authentication using Passport without all the boilerplate.

Installation

npm install feathers-authentication-local --save

Note: This is only compatibile with feathers-authentication@1.x and above.

Documentation

API

This module contains 3 core pieces:

The main entry function
The hashPassword hook
The Verifier class

Main Initialization

In most cases initializing the feathers-authentication-local module is as simple as doing this:

app.configure(authentication(settings));
app.configure(local());

This will pull from your global auth object in your config file. It will also mix in the following defaults, which can be customized.

Default Options

{
    name: 'local', // the name to use when invoking the authentication Strategy
    entity: 'user', // the entity that you're comparing username/password against
    service: 'users', // the service to look up the entity
    usernameField: 'email', // key name of username field on the request
    passwordField: 'password', // key name of password field on the request
    entityUsernameField: 'email', // key name of the username field on the entity (defaults to `usernameField`)
    entityPasswordField: 'password', // key name of the password on the entity (defaults to `passwordField`)
    passReqToCallback: true, // whether the request object should be passed to `verify`
    session: false // whether to use sessions,
    Verifier: Verifier // A Verifier class. Defaults to the built-in one but can be a custom one. See below for details.
}

hashPassword hook

This hook is used to hash plain text passwords before they are saved to the database. It uses the bcrypt algorithm by default but can be customized by passing your own options.hash function.

Default Options

{
    passwordField: 'password', // key name of password field to look on hook.data
    hash: 'function' // default bcrypt hash function. Takes in a password and returns a hash.
}

Verifier

This is the verification class that does the username and password verification by looking up the entity (normally a user) on a given service by the usernameField and compares the hashed password using bcrypt. It has the following methods that can all be overridden. All methods return a promise except verify, which has the exact same signature as passport-local.

{
    constructor(app, options) // the class constructor
    _comparePassword(entity, password) // compares password using bcrypt
    _normalizeResult(result) // normalizes result from service to account for pagination
    verify(req, username, password, done) // queries the service and calls the other internal functions.
}

Customizing the Verifier

The Verifier class can be extended so that you customize it's behavior without having to rewrite and test a totally custom local Passport implementation. Although that is always an option if you don't want use this plugin.

An example of customizing the Verifier:

import local, { Verifier } from 'feathers-authentication-local';
 
class CustomVerifier extends Verifier {
  // The verify function has the exact same inputs and 
  // return values as a vanilla passport strategy
  verify(req, username, password, done) {
    // do your custom stuff. You can call internal Verifier methods
    // and reference this.app and this.options. This method must be implemented.
 
    // the 'user' variable can be any truthy value
    done(null, user);
  }
}
 
app.configure(local({ Verifier: CustomVerifier }));

Expected Request Data

By default, this strategy expects a payload in this format:

{
  strategy: 'local',
  email: '<email>',
  password: '<password>'
}

Complete Example

Here's a basic example of a Feathers server that uses feathers-authentication-local. You can see a fully working example in the example/ directory.

const feathers = require('feathers');
const rest = require('feathers-rest');
const hooks = require('feathers-hooks');
const memory = require('feathers-memory');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
const errorHandler = require('feathers-errors/handler');
const auth = require('feathers-authentication');
const local = require('feathers-authentication-local');
 
// Initialize the application
const app = feathers()
  .configure(rest())
  .configure(hooks())
  // Needed for parsing bodies (login)
  .use(bodyParser.json())
  .use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }))
  // Configure feathers-authentication
  .configure(auth({ secret: 'super secret' }))
  .configure(local())
  .use('/users', memory())
  .use(errorHandler());
 
app.listen(3030);
 
console.log('Feathers app started on 127.0.0.1:3030');

License

Licensed under the MIT license.