REST API Tokens With Passport.js and jwt-simple

• Demonstrates how to use auth token to Node.js with Passport.js and jwt-simple which is useful for building a token-based REST API.

Disclaimer: Work in progress

Install

git clone git@github.com:roblevintennis/passport-api-tokens.git
cd passport-api-tokens
npm install
git submodule init && git submodule update
npm install -g mongodb

Run

You need to fire up mongodb in another tab and then start the node server:

mongod #in another terminal tab
node app
open http://localhost:1337/
Go to Register. Create user.
Go to Login and enter user's email/pass
Click Test Token button and view user returned in console

Tests

make test #to run the test

Background

This is an adaptation of Michael Herman's http://mherman.org/blog/2013/11/11/user-authentication-with-passport-dot-js/ tutorial where he shows an example of using passport-local with an expressjs stack to do local user/password style authentication. I had a need to do API token based authentication where you, essentially:

1. register
2. login
3. get an API token
4. make subsequent ajax http requests to your REST API using the token

So I rewrote from scratch :)

Disclaimer

I feel the need to mention that my background is as a front-end developer with some full stack. I've built similar API's but there are many others that would be more qualified to do this and security, etc., are "hard". If you see a mistake and/or something that could be better feel free to contribute back or create an issue. Thanks!

References

http://mherman.org/blog/2013/11/11/user-authentication-with-passport-dot-js/
https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-local
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20228572/passport-local-with-node-jwt-simple
http://coderead.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/securing-node-js-restful-services-with-jwt-tokens/

Contributing

github "fork and pull request" model