Using Passport to authenticate based on dynamic route - node.js

Question

I'm building an API with Node.js, and I have some endpoints I want to secure.
For simplicity let's assume I'm using HTTP basic authentication (passport-http) for all of my endpoints.
What I'd like to do on top of that, is to make sure that a route like this: api.example.com/users/:uid/ is only accessible by a user with that ID.
I can do it with something like this:
app.get('/users/:uid',
passport.authenticate('basic', {
session: false
}),
function (req, res, next) {
if (req.params.uid !== user.id) {
return next(new Error('Unauthorized'));
}
return next();
},
function (req, res, next) {
// do secret stuff
}
);
But I wonder if there's a way to do this without adding additional middleware, by using Passport itself:
app.get('/users/:uid',
passport.authenticate( ??? ),
function (req, res, next) {
// do secret stuff
}
);
Is it possible? If not, is there a better way?

Answer 1

You can try something perhaps like this. General description: authenticate all requests that hit anything under the /users route as requiring authentication. On your specific route, use some middleware that makes sure that the user trying to access the specific route is the one in the route itself via that uid.
function authorizeUser(req, res, next) {
if (req.user.uid !== req.params.uid) next(new Error('Not your profile!'));
next();
}
// Require login for entire /users section
app.use('/users', passport.authenticate('basic', { session: false }));
// Authorize /users/:uid section to one user
app.use('/users/:uid', authorizeUser);
// Nested routes will all be secured by the middleware above.
app.get('/users/:uid', function (req, res) {
// Secret stuff
});
app.get('/users/:uid/foo/bar', function (req, res) {
// Also secret
});
If you're only securing one endpoint, you can just put it all on the same route.