WhatAuth

WhatAuth is a simple backend authentication helper.

npm install --save whatauth

Usage

Using WhatAuth is a two step process:

1. Configure your OAuth2 providers.
2. Fetch user profiles from those providers.

WhatAuth comes with default OAuth2 settings for Facebook, Google, and Github. You, obviously, still need to provide your app's clientID and clientSecret.

var WhatAuth = require('whatauth');

var wa = new WhatAuth({
  github: {
    id:     GITHUB_CLIENT_ID,
    secret: GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET,
  },
});

Then fetch a user's profile with a query object. The query object should contain a provider, an authorizationCode, and a redirectUri. This query object may come from a frontend library such as ember-what-session or torii.

wa.fetch(query).then(function(profile) {
  // Use the profile object to find and modify an existing account in your
  // database or create a new account.
});

The fetch function returns a Promise, which can be used with ES6 async/await.

let profile = await wa.fetch(query);

WhatAuth convention is to provide a profile with the following five keys. This can be changed by overriding the process function in the provider's configuration.

{
  ident: 'provider:123',
  name:  'Example User',
  email: '[email protected]',
  image: 'profile-picture.jpg',
  data:  rawDataFromTheProvider
}

Test Helper

WhatAuth provides a fake OAuth provider called TestAuth:

var wa = new WhatAuth({ testauth: true });

var query = {
  provider: 'testauth',
  authCode: 'testauth-code-777',
  redirectUri: 'http://localhost:3000'
}

wa.fetch(query).then(function(profile) {
  // The profile object includes a dummy name, ident, email, and image.
});

Custom OAuth2 Provider

You can add your own OAuth2 providers in the configuration. A custom OAuth2 configuration might look something like:

config.auth = {
  custom: {
    accessTokenPath: "https://www.example.com/oauth2/v1/token",
    profileUrl:      "https://www.example.com/oauth2/v1/me",
    process: function(data) {
      return {
        ident: 'example:' + data.id,
        name:  data.username,
        email: data.email,
        image: data.image,
        data:  data
      };
    }
  }
}

See the source code in ./lib/whatauth.js for examples of configuring providers.

Note that WhatAuth is still under development and may change significantly.