This is a question involving single page web apps and my question is in bold.
WARNING:
I'm hardly an expert on this subject and please correct me if I'm wrong in part of my understanding of how I think HTTP and WebSockets work.
My understanding of how HTTP restful APIs work is that they are stateless. We use tools like connect.session() to interject some type of state into our apps at a higher level. Since every single request is new, we need a way to re-identify ourself to the server, so we create a unique token that gets sent back and forth.
Connect's session middleware solves this for us in a pretty cool way. Drop it into your middleware stack and you have awesome-sauce sessions attached to each request for your entire application. Sprinkle in some handshaking and you can pass that session info to socket.io fairly easily, even more awesome. Use a RedisStore to hold the info to decouple it from your connect/express app and it's even more awesome. We're talking double rainbow awesome here.
So right now you could in theory have a single page application that doesn't depend on connect/sessions because you don't need more than 1 session (initial handshake) when it comes to dealing with websockets. socket.io already gives you easy access to this sessionId, problem solved.
Instead of this authentication work flow:
Get the email and password from a post request.
Query your DB of choice by email to get their password hash.
Compare the hashes.
Redirect to "OK!" or "NOPE!".
If OK, store the session info and let connect.session() handle the rest for the most part.
It now becomes:
Listen for a login event.
Get the email and password from the event callback.
Query your DB of choice by email and get their password hash.
Compare the hashes.
Emit an "OK!" or "NOPE!" event.
If OK, do some stuff I'm not going to think of right now but the same effect should be possible?
What else do we benefit from by using connect? Here's a list of what I commonly use:
logger for dev mode
favicon
bodyparser
static server
passport (an authentication library that depends on connect/express, similar to what everyauth offers)
The code that loads the initial single page app would handle setting up a static server and favicon. Something like passport might be more tricky to implement but certainly not impossible. Everything else that I listed doesn't matter, you could easily implement your own debug logger for websockets.
Right now is there really anything stopping us from having a single http based index.html file that encapsulates a websocket connection and doesn't depend on connect at all? Would socket.io really be able to make that type of application architecture work without setting up your own HTTP restful API if you wanted a single page app while offering cross brower support through its auto-magical fallbacks?
The only real downside at this point is caching results on the client right? Couldn't you incorporate local storage for that? I think creating indexable/crawlable content pages for search engines wouldn't be THAT big of a deal -- you would basically create a tool that creates static html files from your persistent database right?
Check out Derby and SocketStream.
I think what you're asking for is if it is plausible (using socket.io) to create a website that is a single static page with dynamically changing content.
The answer is "yes", it can work. Several node.js web frameworks already do this although I don't know of any that use socket.io.
Related
I'm building a next.js project and while I usually would just use the "Custom Express Server" method to implement my graphql API (using apollo-server-express), I thought that it might be a good idea if I decoupled the next.js project from the graphql API so that each of the servers are hosted on different machines.
But usually I would implement any session-related logic in the graphql API, using something like graphql-passport; I figured that's good practice because if I ever choose to add another frontend (maybe a mobile app or something) they can share the same session logic. But given that I'm server side rendering content with next.js, how do I forward the user's session info to the graphql server? Because the next.js server shouldn't have to redo authentication, right?
Let me know if there are any flaws in the architecture too, I'm kind of new to this.
Using the Next server to run the GraphQL service is certainly not a good idea, so yes, do separate the two.
Letting the Next server SSR-render pages with user specific content using the users session is probably not a good idea either, unless you have some specific use case that requires the served HTML pages to have the user specific data in them already. The reasons for this are:
SSR rendering will require lots of server side computations since all pages always will have to be rerendered.
NextJS is moving away (since v9.3) from the getInitialPros() way of doing things towards using getStaticProps() to generate a page that is common for all users and which can load its session dependent stuff straight from the GraphQL API once it is displayed on the client device.
This approach will generally have higher performance and scale much better.
Should you really want to go the "SSR with user session data" route you start in the getServerSideProps(context) method, where context.req is the actual request which will have all your session data in it (cookies or headers).
This session data you can then extract from the req and pass on to the GraphQL server requests that require authentication.
Here I will describe the requirement for my project.
Basically I want to build a chat application which I can embed to different websites for example , site build using wordpress, magento, drupal, custom frameworks ... etc . What I actually need is to embed JavaScript for handling socket chat using (socket.io) on some of the website(wordpress, magento, drupal ....), so what I finally have is a set of javascript code (client side), and a server running in nodejs (with socket.io)
The problem I faced is to manage session for registered users after login. Since my code is embedded on different websites and the node server resides on other server , On each page refresh I faced difficult to validate user session session. Could you please help me how I can manage session in a best way for this application.
If you feel difficulty to understand my need , I can explain in detail with examples
Thanking You
If I understand your problem, you just need to handle user sessions? More specifically on the client side?
Based on the information you give, I will just assume you either return a unique string representing the session on the server to the client. The format of this can either be a cookie, a normal string/token, etc.
For cookies, you shouldn't have much problems, since the browser deals with this. Although you might need to set it up correctly on the server.
For tokens/strings that needs to be returned to the server for each request requiring authentication, you should store it in the session-storage/local storage of the browser, depending on your need. Then you should embed it in every requests back to the server and authenticate it.
I've been looking at node.js, REST APIs and WebSockets lately to further my knowledge about backend and frontend web development. Trying to go with best practices I see REST API comes up all the time. Now my problem which I don't seem to understand how to properly solve.
Say for example I'd like to have client / server decoupled and for this I implement a REST API in the backend so that my frontend will access and get data to render. Specific (imaginary) example: lets say I want to build a rental service website. Now I would like to have an endpoint for my frontend to access information about certain products, let's say the number of bikes that have been rented so far. I'd like to be able to show this on my frontend (through the help of the REST API) but I wouldn't like for other people who call this REST API to be able to get the data (because espionage is a serious business and I'd like to keep the evil ones away, yes they can webcrawl but bla bla). So in essence I'd like for the localhost machine to be able to access (part of) the REST API but not anyone else. Things get complicated because I'd also like people to be able to create a user on my website so then I'd like to have other endpoints which can then be accessed without restriction because I'm thinking, what if at some point I'd like to have a mobile app that is integrated with the service. Then it will be unfeasible to restrict all requests to localhost.
How would you architect a secure server / client as this one? Or in your opinion is it not that big of a deal to have the REST API exposed to others (the evil ones)?
The above goes for WebSockets as well. I know REST APIs are all nice and neat but I think the future lies in near-realtime connections and so I'm likewise as interested in WebSockets (through higher level modules of course, Socket.io, SockJS etc.).
There are many solutions to secure your API out there and many of them are opensource. Which one you'll use really depends your detailed needs.
But to get you started I will mention a solution that is very accepted and supported by a large community:
Have a look at JSON Web Token, which are for example explained in this Article.
Basically your client requests an authentication token from the server and then stores it locally to reuse it for every request to your API.
The Server on the other hand may protect your API as needed. That means you may also have a public API that does not expect a token in the HTTP Header.
Tokens may also expire. That is handy if you, for example, will allow a new user for registering on your site for a limited time.
Here is another article that explains things.
Now on to the websocket part of your question. YES, you definetly want to protect your server side sockets as well. So look out for a library that supports authentication. Again, I think there are a number of opensource libraries out there.
To mention one: Primus.
Primus is an abstraction layer for many socket libraries underneath and lets you quickly change the socket provider. But it also has an authentication hook that you can implement.
And guess what.. you can use it to check for a JSON Web Token!
Hope this gets you started.
I have a node.js webserver with express middleware. I am trying to eliminate the need to session stores for performance reasons. I dont track much as of now.
However, I do need to keep track of username and userid when a session is started after loggig in. I have implemented this using express res.cookie( ... ) which works if cookies are enabled. But it will not work if cookies are disabled.
so I was looking at req.session but that again uses cookieSession internally.
Q1: How can I keep track of username (once user has loggedin )
across multiple requests with cookies disabled in browser and NO-SESSION-STORE
(REDIS/MONGO etc)
Q2: In the solution for Q1 above, I want webserver to be stateless,
so it does not grow in memory at any point?
Is it possible? Does my question/requirement even make sense? I am new to this.
Essentially I am looking for an object other than cookie that can be part of request which will communicated every time request is sent/received
Please help
There are multiple avenues you could potentially take, since it sounds like you control the requester as well as the backend service.
HTTP Headers
Query String
Cookies
We know cookies are out.
With HTTP Headers, you can't always count on them unless you're making some kind of AJAX call.
Query strings require you to ALWAYS send back a user name or other identifier manually. However, it would solve Q1 and Q2.
Depending on what your app is, it might make sense to re-architect endpoints so that they are ReSTful and help define actions - that way it makes semantic sense to have a username as part of the request url.
For example:
GET http://example.com/:username => could display a profile
GET http://example.com/:username/friends => could display a list of friends.
Depending on how your app is designed, you might also be able to utilize websockets to handle user connections and auth.
I have a question - I found a few answers floating around here.
Basically, I want to have a node.js server application serving up json documents for requests.
All templating will happen client side
Some of the requests will require authentication but most will not.
I'd like to eliminate the need for framework (express) session management wherever possible (as recommended by linked-in) to improve performance so I thought of a couple solutions for authentication.
1) Write custom authentication that persists the session as a document and checks it wherever a request is made to the node.js server that needs authentication. Keep all user info in html5 storage or cookies for the dom to use for templating.
+ Works
- Have to write custom security to avoid session management in express/node.
2) Have 2 node.js instances. One serves everything in the public domain. One is for secure requests only. Still keep all user info in the session.
+ Simple as we can push session management onto the framework for requests that require authentication
- Has 2 node instances. May have some bad DRY.
Is the second option reasonable? Or is there another option I'm missing. Option 1 is my fallback as I'd rather not do all of the custom coding when it's already built into express.
EDIT:
To leave one possibility on here, I think I can use multiple callbacks on a resource request to allow an interceptor type pattern for validating user in session. This answers the first question.
From the express documentation:
Several callbacks may also be passed, useful for re-using middleware that load resources, perform validations, etc.
app.get('/user/:id', user.load, function(){
// ...
})