:fire: typescript-rest-fireauth :fire:

Need to add Firebase token authentication to your typescript-rest API?

This project provides a FireAuth decorator that you can place on any typescript-rest API endpoint. It will guard the endpoint, verifying the Firebase ID token passed in with the Authorization header.

As an option, you can also obtain the value of the decoded Firebase ID token for use within your controller.

Usage

Step 1: Installation

Make sure you have typescript-rest installed and that you have configured experimental decorators in your tsconfig.json file. Alternatively, you can use the typescript-rest boilerplate project.

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "experimentalDecorators": true,
    "emitDecoratorMetadata": true
  }
}

Then install typescript-rest-fireauth: npm install typescript-rest-fireauth

Step 2: Configuration

Back-end

The first step is to install and initialize the Firebase Admin SDK. Usually this is best done in the function that starts the server. If you're using the boilerplate project, this would be in start.ts.

Then, in your controller class, add the typescript-rest ServiceContext with the @Context decorator to your controller, and also instantiate a property of type admin.auth.Auth. These will be used to obtain request authorization headers and verify the token with Firebase. Also instantiate a property of type DecodedToken if you'd like to use the decoded Firebase ID token.

import { GET, Path, PathParam, Context, ServiceContext } from 'typescript-rest';
import * as admin from 'firebase-admin';
import { FireAuth, DecodedToken } from 'typescript-rest-fireauth';

@Path('/user')
export class UserController {

  //required by typescript-rest-fireauth
  @Context
  private context: ServiceContext;
  private admin: admin.auth.Auth = admin.auth();
  
  //optional - use to obtain the decoded firebase id token 
  private decodedToken: DecodedToken = new DecodedToken();
}

Finally, add the FireAuth decorator to an endpoint that requires authentication.

/**
* Retrieve a User.
*/
@FireAuth()
@Path(':id')
@GET
getUser(@PathParam('id') id: string): Promise<User> {
    return new Promise<User>((resolve, reject)=>{
        this.myService.getUser(id)
          .then((user) => {
              resolve(user);
          })
          .catch((err) => reject(err));
    });
}

Optional: If you added the DecodedToken as a property on your controller, it will be loaded with the decoded Firebase ID token for the current request.

/**
* Retrieve a User.
*/
@FireAuth()
@Path(':id')
@GET
getUser(@PathParam('id') id: string): Promise<User> {
    return new Promise<User>((resolve, reject)=>{
        console.log('user firebase uid is ' + this.decodedToken.uid);
        this.myService.getUserByUid(this.decodedToken.uid)
          .then((user) => {
              resolve(user);
          })
          .catch((err) => reject(err));
    });
}

Front-end

In your front-end app, requests to the FireAuth endpoints must include the Firebase ID token as a Bearer token in the Authorization header.

Check out the Google documentation on obtaining Firebase ID tokens on the client side.

Here is a sample request:

GET /user/12345 HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:3000
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: Bearer [firebase id token]

Gotchas

If the properties required by typescript-rest-fireauth remain unread in your controller, you may receive an error upon build. You can resolve this by changing noUnusedLocals to false in your tsconfig.json.

Release Notes

1.0.0 - Initial release.

1.1.0 - Switched from Decode parameter decorator to DecodedToken controller property in order to fulfill decoded Firebase ID token, because typescript-rest does not allow additional parameters in POST/PUT methods.

1.1.3 - Bumped firebase-admin to v9.6. This may introduce breaking changes. Please open an issue if you see any.