Retrieve and unjumble cookie data from superagent response header - node.js

I'm using supertest and trying to get the cookie data cleanly
agent.post('/login').send('username:u','password:p').end(function(err, res) {
agent.cookie = res.req._headers.cookie;
});
But to cookie data I get is jumbled up
connect.sid=s%3Afc20GaiFXGNju1rxqDSOEiA4.W3XfTacI0xhk4gQ9Bdh1LLC%2FlhjnAwVmQkUX%2F7%2FJEAo
instead of cleanly like this (and the above is even longer for some reason)
{ 'connect.sid': 'T0jrnU09DzCYN68FsgspuY5g' }
How do I get the latter?

require('cookie').parse(decodeURIComponent(cookie))

Related

How do I access Express.js Cookie in React app?

I'm creating E-shop with MERN Stack
This is my response from the server on Login where you can see, the cookie is SET and it's sent from the Backend.
That means no there shoudln't be problem with BE, but the FE I will need to handle the Cookie on the FE.
How do I access this sent Cookie from Express in the React ?
I have tried something like this:
const handleLogin = async (event) => {
event.preventDefault();
try {
const url = "http://localhost:5000/api/auth/login";
const data = await axios.post(url, formFields);
const { user } = data.data;
// Here I have tried to access it from Headers where I can see it in the attached
// picture under Set-Cooki. But inside headers I can only see
// Content-Length and Content-Type
console.log(data.headers);
// Aswell I have tried react-cookie but docs are not clear enough for me.
// and this just sets cookie from react, I would like to use cookie from express
// and set it like this
// await setCookie("user", "INSERT_HERE_COOKIE_FROM_EXPRESS.JS", {
// path: "/",
// });
setCurrentUser(user);
await resetFormFields();
} catch (error) {
const data = error.response.data;
!data.error
? alert(`${data.message}`)
: alert(`${data.message}: ${data.error}`);
}
};
Thank you for any answers, I'm sure it's not that hard as I think and it's few lines of code.
As I see on your screenshot - you use express with httpOnly cookies:
https://developer.mozilla.org/ru/docs/Web/HTTP/Cookies -
A cookie with the HttpOnly attribute is inaccessible to the JavaScript Document.cookie API; it's only sent to the server. For example, cookies that persist in server-side sessions don't need to be available to JavaScript and should have the HttpOnly attribute. This precaution helps mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
And I think you don't want to use nonsecure cookies in your E-shop - so you can't access it, but you can use custom headers, so on your frontend it will be like:
fetch('/myapi').then(response => console.log(response.headers.get('myCustomHeader')));

How to get response body from Express.js server using Supertest?

I started to write some tests for my application and I have issues to read/get response from the server. I tried many things but nothing really worked, can someone help me please ?
// /api/checkCreds
exports.checkCreds = async function(req, res){
//validation
if(!await User.checkCreds(req.body.username, req.body.password)){
var result = {error: true, data: "Incorrect"}
res.sendStatus = 401;
return res.send(JSON.stringify(result));
}
If credentials sent to the server aren't matching, return a response with "Incorrect" message back to the user.
In the test I'm trying to get data from the server to check if properties are matching the expected output.
//test.js
it("We should fail with HTTP code 401 because incorrect data is passed (username='incorrect' password='incorrect')", function(done){
supertest(app)
.post('/api/checkCreds')
.send({username: 'incorrect', password: 'incorrect'})
.expect({error: true, data: "Incorrect"})
.expect(401, done);
});
When ran, test fails because expected properties are different from the response sent by the server, which is an empty object {}.
Any help is appreciated.
You may try changing your first expect to see if you can coax supertest into showing you the actual body that it's comparing to. For example, expect('')
If that doesn't work, there's a version of expect that accepts a function. In that function, you should be able to print out what you are getting in the response body, ie. console.log(res).
It may be that there's some confusion with the JSON return type-- I haven't used that directly. You could try expecting JSON.
Finally, there's a strange paragraph in the documentation that I don't think applies, but I thought I'd mention:
One thing to note with the above statement is that superagent now sends any HTTP error (anything other than a 2XX response code) to the callback as the first argument if you do not add a status code expect (i.e. .expect(302)).
While trying to fix my issue, I noticed that in the HTTP response, Content-Type header was set to text/plain and my server was returning JSON, so that probably was the thing that confused supertest.
I think that res.send() sets the header to text/plain by default and I had to manually set the header value to application/json by using res.type('json'). At that point I was able to read the response body without an issue.
I also learned that res.json() sets the Content-Type header to application/json by default, so you don't need to do it manually like with res.send().
Working code:
// /api/checkCreds
if(!await User.checkCreds(req.body.username, req.body.password)){
var result = {error: true, data: "Incorrect"}
return res.status(401).json(result);
}
//test.js
it("We should fail with HTTP code 401 because incorrect data is passed (username='incorrect' password='incorrect')", function(done){
supertest(app)
.post('/api/checkCreds')
.set('Content-type', 'application/json')
.send({username: 'incorrect', password: 'incorrect'})
.expect(401)
.expect(function(res){
console.log(res.body);
})
.end(done);
});
Feel free to correct me if I stated something that isn't quite right.

get access token from back and cache it to browser

hey guys. i'm working with axios,nodeJS and vue . i want
to generate an accessToken in node (it's done) and get it
with axios (it's done too) and cache it to browser cache with
vue(don't know how), so whenever i want to send a request to
node,i could send it with headers of axios , i dont know if it's
possible or not ? need some help around here.
Yes, that's possible and is pretty common.
To do it, you just have to store the token in the browser memory (usually in the localStorage) and then use axios interceptors on the requests to automatically add the token.
How you can add items to local storage?
localStorage.setItem('my-key',my-value)
you can find the complete docs here.
axios.interceptors.request.use(
config => {
//here retrieve the token and add it (if present)
//most probably you would use VUEX for storing it
//in you app
const token = yourLocalStorageAccessor.getAccessToken();
if (token) {
config.headers['Authorization'] = 'Bearer ' + token;
}
// config.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/json';
return config;
},
error => {
Promise.reject(error)
});
You can read about axios interceptors here.

How to include access-token in the HTTP header when requesting a new page from browser

The similar question was asked by someone else (here) but got no proper answer. Since this is basic and important for me (and maybe for someone else as well), I'm trying to ask here. I'm using Node.js+Express+EJS on the server side. I struggled to make the token authentication succeeded by using jsonwebtoken at the server and jQuery's ajax-jsonp at the web browser. Now after the token is granted and stored in the sessionStorage at the browser side, I can initiate another ajax request with the token included in the request header, to get the user's profile and display it somewhere in the 'current' page. But what I want is to display a new web page to show the user's profile instead of showing it in the 'current' page (the main/index page of the website). The question is:
How to initiate such an HTTP GET request, including the token in the HTTP header; and display the response as a new web page?
How the Node.js handle this? if I use res.render then where to put the js logic to verify the token and access the DB and generate the page contents?
Or, should we say the token mechanism is more suitable for API authentication than for normal web page authentication (where the web browser provides limited API)?
I think the answer to this question is important if we want to use the token mechanism as a general authentication since in the website scenario the contents are mostly organized as web pages at the server and the APIs at the client are provided by the browser.
By pure guess, there might be an alternative way, which the ajax success callback to create a new page from the current page with the response from the server, but I have no idea of how to realize that as well.
By calling bellow code successfully returned the HTML contents in customer_profile.ejs, but the client side ajax (obviously) rejected it.
exports.customer_profile = function (req, res) {
var token = req.headers.token;
var public_key = fs.readFileSync(path.resolve() + '/cert/public_key.pem');
var decoded = jwt.verify(token, public_key);
var sql = 'SELECT * FROM customer WHERE username = "' + decoded.sub + '"';
util.conn.query(sql, function (err, rows) {
if (!err) {
for (var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {
res.render('customer_profile', {customer_profile: rows[i]});
break;
}
}
});
};
I am trying to find a solution to this as well. Please note, I am using Firebase for some functionality, but I will try to document the logic as best as I can.
So far what I was able to figure out is the following:
Attach a custom header to the HTTP request client-side
// landing.js - main page script snippet
function loadPage(path) {
// Get current user's ID Token
firebase.auth().currentUser.getIdToken()
.then(token => {
// Make a fetch request to 'path'
return fetch(`${window.location.origin}/${document.documentElement.lang}/${path}`, {
method: 'GET',
headers: {'X-Firebase-ID-Token': token} // Adds unverified token to a custom header
});
})
.then(response => {
// As noted below, this part I haven't solved yet.
// TODO: Open response as new webpage instead of displaying as data in existing one
return response.text();
})
.then(text => {
console.log(text);
})
.catch(error => {
console.log(error);
});
}
Verify the token according to your logic by retrieving the corresponding header value server-side
// app.js - main Express application server-side file
// First of all, I set up middleware on my application (and all other setup).
// getLocale - language negotiation.
// getContext - auth token verification if it is available and appends it to Request object for convenience
app.use('/:lang([a-z]{2})?', middleware.getLocale, middleware.getContext, routes);
// Receives all requests on optional 2 character route, runs middleware then passes to router "routes"
// middleware/index.js - list of all custom middleware functions (only getContext shown for clarity)
getContext: function(req, res, next) {
const idToken = req.header('X-Firebase-ID-Token'); // Retrieves token from header
if(!idToken) {
return next(); // Passes to next middleware if no token, terminates further execution
}
admin.auth().verifyIdToken(idToken, true) // If token provided, verify authenticity (Firebase is kind enough to do it for you)
.then(token => {
req.decoded_token = token; // Append token to Request object for convenience in further middleware
return next(); // Pass on further
})
.catch(error => {
console.log('Request not authorized', 401, error)
return next(); // Log error to server console, pass to next middleware (not interested in failing the request here as app can still work without token)
});
}
Render and send back the data
// routes/index.js - main router for my application mounted on top of /:lang([a-z]{2})? - therefore routes are now relative to it
// here is the logic for displaying or not displaying the page to the user
router.get('/console', middleware.getTranslation('console'), (req, res) => {
if(req.decoded_token) { // if token was verified successfully and is appended to req
res.render('console', responseObject); // render the console.ejs with responseObject as the data source (assume for now that it contains desired DB data)
} else {
res.status(401).send('Not authorized'); // else send 401 to user
}
});
As you can see I was able to modularize the code and make it neat and clear bu use of custom middleware. It is right now a working API returning data from the server with the use of authentication and restricted access
What I have not solved yet:
As mentioned above, the solution uses fetch API and result of the request is data from server (html) and not a new page (i.e when following an anchor link). Meaning the only way with this code now is to use DOM manipulation and setting response as innerHTML to the page. MDN suggests that you can set 'Location' header which would display a new URL in the browser (the one you desire to indicate). This means that you practically achieved what both, you and I wanted, but I still can't wrap my head around how to show it the same way browser does when you follow a link if you know what I mean.
Anyways, please let me know what you think of this and whether or not you were able to solve it from the part that I haven't yet

How can you use cookies with superagent?

I'm doing cookie session management with express with something like this:
req.session.authentication = auth;
And I verify the authenticated urls with something like
if(!req.session.authentication){res.send(401);}
Now I'm building tests for the URLs with mocha, superagent and should, however I can't seem to find a way to get/set the cookie with superagent. I even tried to request the login before the authenticated test but it is not working,
I have tried adding the request to the login in the before statement for the mocha BDD suite, however it is still telling me that the request is unauthorized, I have tested the authentication doing the requests from the browser, however it is not working from the suite any ideas why?
Use superagent.agent() (instead of plain old superagent) to make requests have persistent cookies. See 'Saving cookies' in the superagent docs, or the code examples: agency.js, controller.test.js.
Seems like following code works fine;
req.set('Cookie', "cookieName1=cookieValue1;cookieName2=cookieValue2");
If the issue is in sending cookies for CORS requests use .withCredentials() method
described here
request
.get('http://localhost:4001/')
.withCredentials()
.end(function(err, res) { })
Since you mentioned you need to both get and set the cookie:
Get:
const request = await Superagent.get('...')
const cookie = request.header['set-cookie']
Set:
Superagent.post('...').set('Cookie', 'cookie_info')
2020 +
A clean way to do it is:
create a simple cookie store
abstract set Cookie to send it in each request
update the cookie only when needed
Note I keep the same URL because I use graphql but you can make it a parameter:
const graph = agent =>
agent.post('/graph')
.set('cookie', cookieStore.get());
const handleCookie = res =>
cookieStore.set(res.headers['set-cookie'][0]);
let currentCookie="";
const cookieStore = {
set: cookie=>{currentCookie=cookie},
get: cookie=>currentCookie,
};
module.exports = {graph,connectTestUser,handleCookieResponse};
You can now just use graph(agent) to send a request and handleCookie(response) when you have a response that may update your cookie (set or clear), example:
graph(agent).end((err,res) => {
if (err) return done(err);
res.statusCode.should.equal(200);
handleCookie(res);
return done();
});
Add a cookie to agent cookiejar:
const request = require('superagent');
const {Cookie} = require('cookiejar')
const agent = request.agent()
agent.jar.setCookie(new Cookie("foo=bar"))

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