Read CASL in Expressjs app for details.

CASL is an isomorphic authorization JavaScript library which restricts what resources a given user is allowed to access.

This is an example application which shows how integrate CASL in blog application. There are 3 entities:

• User
• Post
• Comment

Application uses passport-jwt for authentication. Permission logic (i.e., abilities) are define in src/auth/abilities.js. Rules can be specified for authenticated and anonymous users, so potentially it's quite easy to give access anonymous users to leave comments in blog. The main logic is built on top of modules (src/modules)

Note: refactored to use CASL 2.0. See @casl/ability and @casl/mongoose for details. Warning: this code is just an example and doesn't follow best practices everywhere (e.g. it stores passwords without hashing).

git clone https://github.com/stalniy/casl-express-example.git
cd casl-express-example
npm install
npm start # `npm run dev` to run in dev mode

Also you need mongodb database up and running. Application will connect to mongodb://localhost:27017/blog

1. Create new user

POST http://localhost:3030/users
{
  "user": {
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "password": "password"
  }
}

2. Create new session

POST http://localhost:3030/session
{
  "session": {
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "password": "password"
  }
}

201 Created
{ "accessToken": "...." }

3. Put access token in Authorization header for all future requests

• /posts
• /posts/:id/comments
• /users
• /session

To create or update an entity you need to send parameters in wrapper object, which key equals entity name. For example, to create new user you send:

{
  "user": {
    "....": "...."
  }
}

to create a post you send

{
  "post": {
    "....": "...."
  }
}