Auth Backend

Typescript RESTful backend application template for User Authentication and Authorization.

👉 STAR ⭐ this project for later use and to keep posted on the changes.

Table of Contents

• Auth Backend
  • Table of Contents
  • General Information
  • Features
  • Technologies and Techniques
    • Project configuration
    • Main application
    • Security
    • Testing
  • Setup
  • Project Status
  • Room for Improvement

General Information

• This project was created to fullfil the need several Software Engineers have when trying to create a Fullstack Web project from scratch.
• It provides the source code backend template to authenticate and authorize users by exposing RESTful APIs. It also secures the APIs with techniques such as Limiting the number of calls per IP and delaying the calls reponse.

Features

• Username and password signup ✔
• User and password login ✔
• Account verification via email ✔
• Public/open route example ✔
• Route protection with expirable security tokens:
  • Via Autorization header as Bearer token ✔
  • Via cookies ✔
  • Via custom header keys 🔜
• Forgot password 🔜
• Change password 🔜
• User password expiration 🔜
• Account verification via SMS 🔜
• Authentication with Google 🔜

Technologies and Techniques

Project configuration

• The configuration variables are stored in a .env file. This file is managed by a configurator module to facilitate its usage across the other application modules by using the dotenv library.
• The project architecture was implemented by enhancing the concepts of MVC to get a more robust architecture with clear separation of concerns:

📦src
 ┣ 📂api  => Main source code container.
 ┃ ┣ 📂controllers  => Orchestrators that use Services and Middlewares to provide a response.
 ┃ ┣ 📂interfaces  => Typescript Interface and Type definitions to be used in the project.
 ┃ ┣ 📂middlewares  => Functions to be executed before the Router's main controllers.
 ┃ ┣ 📂models  => Entity definitions that encapsulate Database and ORM apis.
 ┃ ┣ 📂routers  => Routers of the application.
 ┃ ┃ ┗📂__tests__ => Jest test files.
 ┃ ┣ 📂services  => Functions containing the all the Business Logic of the application.
 ┃ ┗ 📂util  => Functions used multiple times across the folders in the project.
 ┣ 📂config  => Configuration for the different components of the application.
 ┃ ┗ 📂tests  => Test configuration files.
 ┣ 📂public  => Publicly available resources.
 ┗ 📜index.ts  => Main file that starts the database and the main application.

Main application

• This project was implenmented 100% with Typescript, Nodejs and Express.
• Authentication is implemented with the bcryptjs library for password encryption and the Local stategy from the Passport library.
• Authorization is done with JWT strategy from the Passport library.
• Tokenization is done with jsonwebtoken.
• MongoDB and the mongoose ORM were used for the databse.
• Email service is handled with nodemailer and using gmail as Email server for testing purposes.
• Compression is being used for performance.

Security

• Cors and Helmet were used to avoid well-known web vulnerabilities.
• The number of calls to the SignUp route is limited to avoid infinite calls that may block the internal resources, this was implemented with express-rate-limit
• Every SignUp route call from the same IP will have a delayed response to avoid bruteforce attacks. This is implemented with express-slow-down

Testing

• Unite Testing code coverage is 100%
• The unit testing is done with Jest.
• SuperTest library is used to test the HTTP server.
• A MongoDB in memory server was used to perform a complete test with database interaction, this was possible with the mongodb-memory-server library.
• MailSlurp with a free account configuration was used to perform the Account email verification:

Setup

1. Clone this project by doing:

$ git clone https://github.com/pieroguerrero/auth-backend.git

2. Go to the folder you've just cloned the code and execute:

$ npm install

WARNING: If you are going to use other libraries to achieve other purposes be carefull and remove the caret (^) prefix that the dependency versions have.

3. Create a .env file in your project's container folder. The file should have the following variables with your own values:

#Node Enviromental variable used for performance purposes
NODE_ENV="development"

#APP/SERVER CONFIGS

#Port number to be used by the current application:
PORT="3000"

#DATABASE CONFIGS

#MongoDB full connection string:
MONGODB_URI="<your-own-value-here>"

#JWT TOKEN CONFIGS

#A value to be used as seed by the JWT jsonwebtoken library in order to sign the payload:
SECRET_TOKEN_KEY="<your-own-value-here>"
#Number of iterations for the encryption algotithm:
TOKE_SALT_LENGTH=10
#JWT token expiration time, expressed in seconds or a string describing a time span zeit/ms. Eg: 60, "2 days", "10h", "7d":
JWT_EXPIRATION_IN_SECONDS="<your-own-value-here>"
#When 'true', it will provide and receive the authorization token via the cookies. Otherwhise will handle it via Authorization header with a bearer token:
TOKEN_FROM_COOKIE="false"
#Useful only when TOKEN_FROM_COOKIE is 'true'. This parameter gives a name to the cookie is going to be used to provide and receive the authorization token:
JWT_TOKEN_COOKIE_NAME="<your-own-value-here>"

#EMAIL CONFIGS

#Gmail Email host, commonly: 'smtp.gmail.com':
EMAIL_GMAIL_HOST="smtp.gmail.com"
#Gmail email address to use used as the email sender:
EMAIL_GMAIL_ADDRESS="<your-own-value-here>"
#Gmail email sender password:
EMAIL_GMAIL_PASS="<your-own-value-here>"
#Secret key to perform Email Verification testing with Jest and Supertest. You can get one free at: https://mailslurp.com/
EMAIL_MAILSLURP_KEY="YOUR KEY HERE"

#API SECURE SETTINGS
#Establishes the time in milliseconds in wich an IP can make a certain number of calls
RATE_LIMIT_TIME_IN_MS="60000"
#Establishes the number of calls that can be made in the time set by RATE_LIMIT_TIME_IN_MS
RATE_LIMIT_MAX_CALLS="2"
#How long to keep records of requests in memory.
SPEED_LIMIT_TIME_WINDOW_IN_MS="30000"
#Max number of connections during SPEED_LIMIT_TIME_WINDOW_IN_MS before starting to delay responses. Defaults to 1. Set to 0 to disable delaying.
SPEED_LIMIT_DELAY_AFTER="1"
#How long to delay the response, multiplied by (number recent hits - SPEED_LIMIT_DELAY_AFTER). Defaults to 1000 (1 second). Set to 0 to disable delaying.
SPEE_LIMIT_DELAYING_TIME_IN_MS="500"

Project Status

Project is: in progress

Room for Improvement

There are always room for improvement, in this project so far the thinkgs that can be improved are:

• A separate web page for the Docs containing the API catalogs.