PouchDB Authentication

Easy user authentication for PouchDB/CouchDB.

Note

The following changes have been been made in this fork:

• Changed package name to pouchdb-auth-utils
• Updated to use PouchDB 7.x dependencies, and to work as a plugin with PouchDB 7.x
• Rewritten in TypeScript
• Support for callbacks removed. I'm not using callbacks, I hate callbacks, nobody should be using callbacks. Promises are where its at.
• added hasRole(), addRoles(), and deleteRoles() functions
• Testing now uses Headless Chromium (via puppeteer) instead of PhantomJS, since PhantomJS was basically deprecated in favor of Headless Chromium. This means we can now use ES6 features like let and const and arrow functions in the tests.
• Bundle has increased in size, unfortunately, because it now includes the following dependencies:
  • node-fetch and fetch-cookie: the version of fetch-cookie currently (2019-02-18) used by pouchdb-fetch is outdated and would not parse cookies with commas or hyphens in them. So I had to update them and include them in this plugin. Also, I would just use PouchDB.fetch() if possible, and avoid pulling any kind of fetch in as a dependency. However, PouchDB.fetch() must be run from an actual PouchDB database, as in

    var db = new PouchDB("http://localhost:5984/testdb");
    var res = db.fetch("/_membership");

    and unfortunately PouchDB assumes you are fetching something from the database itself, so it tries to fetch from http://localhost:5984/testdb/_membership instead of http://localhost:5984/_membership, which naturally causes an error. Creating a weird "virtual" URL (such as http://localhost:5984/testdb/../_membership) will work for some cases (a browser environment using recent versions of Chrome, at least), but not for a Node environment. So I gave up.
  • url-parse: pouchdb-utils has an included parseUri() function that used to take care of this, but it parses wildly incorrectly if you try to parse some CouchDB 2.x URLs like /_node/couchdb@localhost/config. Using native URL() objects doesn't work in a Node environment if Node < 10.x, so I included url-parse instead.

---

---

Original ReadMe

var db = new PouchDB('http://mysite:5984/mydb', {skip_setup: true});
db.logIn('batman', 'brucewayne').then(function (batman) {
  console.log("I'm Batman.");
  return db.logOut();
});

Overview

You know what's hard? Security. You know what makes security really easy? CouchDB.

That's right, CouchDB is more than a database: it's also a RESTful web server with a built-in authentication framework. And it boasts some top-notch security features:

• salts and hashes passwords automatically with PBKDF2
• stores a cookie in the browser
• refreshes the cookie every 10 minutes (default)

And best of all, CouchDB does it with good ol'-fashioned HTTP. Just open up the network tab and watch the JSON fly back and forth.

To get started, just install CouchDB, throw in a little SSL, and you've got everything you need for your site's authentication.

Project status

This plugin uses vanilla CouchDB. The goal is to give you a lightweight authentication API that doesn't require anything fancy – no additional server daemons, no third-party providers, just straight-up Pouch and Couch.

So this is more of a reference implementation than an all-in-one solution. If there's a feature missing that you need, you will probably need to write a custom server (see the CouchDB Authentication recipes section for details).

Since version 1.0.0, this plugin does support Node.js.

Using PouchDB Authentication

• Setup
• API
• CouchDB Authentication recipes

Changelog

PouchDB Authentication follows semantic versioning. To see a changelog with all PouchDB Authentication releases, check out the Github releases page.

Contributing

We use standard-version for release versioning along with Angular-style commit messages to automate the changelog generation. To help you make good commit messages, you are advised to install and use commitizen.

PouchDB Authentication is heavily tested, so you'll also want to check out the testing guide.

Big Thanks

Cross-browser Testing Platform and Open Source <3 Provided by Sauce Labs.