authentication.md

Authentication

Mesa supports client authentication through a simple API that can adapt to support your authentication infrastructure.

Currently authentication requires Pub/Sub to be enabled on your server. In the future we'll add support for authentication without Pub/Sub enabled.

If you learn better from examples, click here

How-To

When a client connects to your server, call the client.authenticate method to setup a handler for when your client wants to authenticate itself against your server

Authenticate Method

client.authenticate takes in a single method with two parameters: a data and a callback method:

client.authenticate((data, done) => {})

The data parameter is data sent from your client which should contain enough information to authenticate your client. For example, this may be an object containing a token parameter:

{
  "token": "user_token"
}

Done Callback

The done parameter is a method that takes in two different paremeters: error and user:

done(error, user)

The error parameter should contain an Error object in the case that something went wrong authenticating your client, or if your client couldn't be authenticated for whatever reason.

If there was no error, simply pass in null to this parameter

User Object

The user parameter should contain an object with a structure like this:

{
  "id": "user_id",
  "user": {}
}

The id property should be the id of the authenticated user.

The user property should be your user object. This is optional, but if you choose not to include this simply set it to the following:

{
  "id": "user_id"
}

That's it! Hopefully the Mesa authentication API is able to fit and adapt to your needs. If you have any issues, open up a GitHub issue or contact a maintainer

Example

The following example uses the jsonwebtoken and monk libraries to authenticate connecting clients:

import { Mesa } from '@cryb/mesa'

import monk from 'monk'
import jwt from 'jsonwebtoken'

// Setting up the MongoDB client
const db = monk(process.env.MONGO_URI)
const collection = db.collection(users)

const server = new Mesa({
  port: 4000,

  redis: 'redis://localhost:6379'
})

mesa.on('connection', client => {
  client.authenticate(async (data, done) => {
    try {
      // Get the body object of the json web token
      const body = jwt.verify(data.token, process.env.JWT_KEY)

      // Get the id of the user
      const userId = body.id

      // Lookup the user in our database
      const user = await collection.findOne({ 'id': id })

      // Call the done method with our user id and user object
      done(null, { id: user.id, user: user })
    } catch(error) {
      done(error)
    }
  })
})