Passport

http://passportjs.org

Passport is an authentication framework for Connect and Express, which is extensible through "plugins" known as strategies.

Passport is designed to be a general-purpose, yet simple, modular, and unobtrusive, authentication framework. Passport's sole purpose is to authenticate requests. In being modular, it doesn't force any particular authentication strategy on your application. In being unobtrusive, it doesn't mount routes in your application. The API is simple: you give Passport a request to authenticate, and Passport provides hooks for controlling what occurs when authentication succeeds or fails.

Installation

$ npm install passport

Usage

Strategies

Passport uses the concept of strategies to authenticate requests. Strategies can range from verifying username and password credentials, delegated authentication using OAuth (for example, via Facebook or Twitter), or federated authentication using OpenID.

Before asking passport to authenticate a request, the strategy (or strategies) used by an application must be configured.

passport.use(new LocalStrategy(
  function(username, password, done) {
    User.findOne({ username: username, password: password }, function (err, user) {
      done(err, user);
    });
  }
));

Sessions

Passport will maintain persistent login sessions. In order for persistent sessions to work, the authenticated user must be serialized to the session, and deserialized when subsequent requests are made.

Passport does not impose any restrictions on how your user records are stored. Instead, you provide a function to Passport which implements the necessary serialization and deserialization logic. In typical applications, this will be as simple as serializing the user ID, and finding the user by ID when deserializing.

passport.serializeUser(function(user, done) {
  done(null, user.id);
});

passport.deserializeUser(function(id, done) {
  User.findById(id, function (err, user) {
    done(err, user);
  });
});

Connect/Express Middleware

To use Passport in a Connect or Express-based application, configure it with the required passport.initialize() middleware. If your applications uses persistent login sessions (recommended, but not required), passport.session() middleware must also be used.

app.configure(function() {
  app.use(express.cookieParser());
  app.use(express.bodyParser());
  app.use(express.session({ secret: 'keyboard cat' }));
  app.use(passport.initialize());
  app.use(passport.session());
  app.use(app.router);
  app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/../../public'));
});

Authenticate Requests

Passport provides an authenticate() function (which is standard Connect/Express middleware), which is utilized to authenticate requests.

For example, it can be used as route middleware in an Express application:

app.post('/login', 
  passport.authenticate('local', { failureRedirect: '/login' }),
  function(req, res) {
    res.redirect('/');
  });

Examples

For a complete, working example, refer to the login example included in Passport-Local.

Strategies

Tests

$ npm install --dev
$ make test

Credits

• Jared Hanson

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2011 Jared Hanson

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.