I feel like I am wanting to do something that is either easy, or very wrong. Not sure which one yet.
I am wanting to build an application that is backed by Firebase for:
Authentication
Realtime Database
I will build an Angular2 Front end Single Page App using AngularFire2. Using AngularFire2, the user will authenticate using GoogleAuthentication provider. The Angular2 app will interact with the firebase realtime database directly under most cases.
But I have some cases that I want a NodeJS/Express REST API layer todo more complex business logic and interact with FireBase Database. What I want to have happen is when the user authenticates with AngularFire2 that the accessToken can be used on the API calls to NodeJS in the HTTP Header. Then inside the NodeJS Firebase SDK I just authenticate using that token.
How would you go about doing this? I've been digging through documentation for a while now and still haven't figure it out.
Took lots of digging, but I found the solution. I hope this is a useful thread for others to find.
The accepted answer at: Answer gives a good lead to this. Specifically look at:
Authenticating your privileged workers
Emulating users or limiting access from a server process
Validating client identity via security
Related
--First time poster, mods please let me know if the question is inappropriate/incorrect--
Situation:
I'm working on an app with friends. We have a dedicated frontend layer and a dedicated nodejs server running MongoDB. I am trying to integrate firebase into our server layer so we can login users and handle minting/verifying/refreshing tokens using Firebase Auth.
Problem:
I'm completely lost as to how to use Firebase Auth for this purpose. I've looked through the docs extensively, I first went down the "Getting Started with Firebase on an App", until I realized (I think) that guide was specifically for web applications without a dedicated backend.
Then I looked more into Firebase Auth Admin, which looked more like what I was looking for. I tried messing with custom token creation and other authentication related matters but I fail to be able to log in.
I reached out to friends for help, they recommended getting local login/googleauth working End-to-end using firebase before trying to secure our tokens moreso than they already are.
I'm very lost and not sure if I'm misunderstanding something fundamental or just not applying the right things. I apologize if this is unclear, I'm just trying to allow email/password login using firebase auth to securely authenticate with my MongoDB data (if that's even necessary)
Any guidance would be appreciated!
You're absolutely right with your approach and its possible to use Firebase Auth for just login/signup and rest of all on mongoDB.
There are 2 ways u can implement the Firebase Auth-
Using the sdk provided by Firebase
Using the Admin Auth API
Which ever way you selected, Later on save your UID on your custom Backend (Which is backed by MongoDB)
Just create your API's to verify user identity.
If you're using NodeJs you can follow this tutorial.
I am trying to build a portfolio website using react where I can showcase my projects and skills . I also want a seperate blog section in my website which lists my blog posts. I am aquatinted with node js and rest API so I can create a crud rest API for blog posts locally and use it to get all the blog posts .
How to deploy the blogs rest API online and make it secure such way that only I can access existing and submit new blog posts from my portfolio website after deployment ?
This may be too generalized of a question to give you exactly what you're looking for, but we can hit on some broad strokes to give you some idea.
Hosting. If you're using Heroku or similar, then they have their own instructions and guides on how to do deploy to their system. If you're self-hosting or are required to setup the host yourself, then you basically just need something that will load balance and auto-restart the node application so that it's always running. Commonly, you can use Docker or PM2 (or a combination of both) to do this. You can then put this behind a web server like Nginx or Apache to fine-tune your configuration.
Authentication. If the API is exposed to the public then you need a method of authentication. Commonly, you can use a system that leverages JWTs (login, sign a jwt with the user's ID, then have the client provide the jwt for each protected API request via authentication header or cookie, validate that the token hasn't expired and the user ID is correct, then respond back). You can use a middleware like Passport or write your own (imo Passport may be overkill for smaller projects).
(Tom Vaga asked a similar question here but Luke's response didn't quite address what I'd hoped to accomplish... I'd comment there but don't have the points yet :-) Thanks! )
I've got a Slim server working well to register and authenticate users for our API, using JWT, allowing only 'authenticated' users to access certain api endpoints.
I'm now trying to setup a SocketCluster for various realtime messaging parts of the app, and I would like to restrict subscriptions to only authenticated users. I may be missing a part of the concept, but is it not possible to use the token-cookie set successfully by Slim to also authenticate to SocketCluster? (ideally using the built-in authentication process, and without having to call-back to the slim-api?) They're on different servers as sub-domains... Would I have to insert the same secret into the SocketCluster configuration somewhere?
Thank you!
I am used to develop web apps using the Meteor JavaScript framework, which handles authentication. I am now developing for the first time a web app using a Node.js (Express) + GraphQL stack on the backend, with React on the frontend, so I have to handle authentication myself.
I read a lot of things about it, and I like the idea of token based authentication. I am thinking about using JWT, so I don't have to deal with sessions.
I know there are a lot of tutorials, but each one always has a sort of disclaimer like : "this tutorial is not production ready, use it for educational purposes only...". Every time I read something about authentication, it seems to be something so difficult to implement that I shouldn't implement it myself. But I don't want to use services providers like AWS Cognito, Google Cloud Platform because I want to keep my users data in my own system and database. I don't want to be tied to a third party provider.
I know how to generate jwt tokens, refresh tokens, how to verify them, etc... I am able to develop a working auth system, but I am never sure I do it in a secure and production ready way because of all those comments I can read on the Internet.
So, what would you recommend to implement a secured and production ready authentication system in a Node.js server without being tied to a third-party provider. Do you know any complete tutorial or documentation about it?
There are several approaches to implement authentication for an application.
Use a identity server manage by you
Use a fully manage service for authentication.
Use authentication middleware.
Write your own authentication solution.
If you are afraid in vender locking I would suggest to use an authentication middleware like PassportJS which will facilitate the abstraction of authentication strategy with its implementation.
On the otherhand writing your custom authentication can be challenging in terms of security, specially finding snd fixing these vulnerabilities.
I am a complete beginner, and have just started learning about web development. Now I am asking myself some questions regards REST API: Does it make sense to secure a REST API with authentication? If so, what are the common ways of doing this?
I am under the impression that REST API's are precisely there because we try to enable many different users to access them. Now I would like to write a small application which makes requests to a node.js server and gets some stuff back. All via REST API.
However, I do not want others to be able to make similar requests to that server though. How would I best secure this? Am I misunderstanding something big time here?
Not authenticating the REST APIs means you are allowing everybody to hit your REST endpoints. It is a better practise to authenticate REST APIs and allow only certain users to access the APIs. The link might help you to have a start.
It is super simple: when you provide a service, most likely, you only want to allow certain, authenticated users to call that service. In other words: it is possible to have rest services that work without any kind of authentication - but is rather the exception, not the rule.
The more common approach is that, say a hotel only allows people with a key to enter rooms. Same story for services ...
And there are many ways to do that, see here for a starting point.
Authentication is important for REST APIs because you only want certain users to access your data via GET api and/or be able to make modifications to your database via POST api.
JSON Web Tokens(JWT) is the most commonly used authentication framework. Here's a very basic tutorial about how to authenticate node js API with JWT.