16 Jul 2012 Using passport with flatiron (or - strictly - union).

So, few days ago I tried using passport authenticating middleware with flatiron framework and found out it doesn’t really want to come along.

It’s not really about flatiron, but about it’s middleware framework, called union.

The main problem is, it doesn’t use standard http.IncomingMessage prototype, passing it’s own union.RoutingStream instead. Luckily for us, there’s a #flatiron branch available with a quick hack to work around it. Also, according to the #24 issue there should be native support for different frameworks in passport, soon. So, first thing to do for now is to add following line to our package.json:

1
2
3

"dependencies": {
    "passport": "git://github.com/jaredhanson/passport.git#flatiron"
}

After npm install we should be able to create a simple authentication:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29

app = flatiron.app
LocalStrategy = require('passport-local').Strategy

passport.use new LocalStrategy (email, password, done) ->
    # usual auth logic here

app.use flatiron.plugins.http, before: [
    connect.cookieParser()
    connect.session secret: 'passport-flatiron'
    passport.initialize()
    passport.session()
]

passport.serializeUser (user, done) ->
    done null, user

passport.deserializeUser (obj, done) ->
    User.findOne email: obj, (err, user) -> # change to our db query
        done err, user

routes =
    '/login':
        get: # render login form here
        post: ->
            res = @res
            passport.authenticate('local') @req, @res, -> res.emit 'next'

app.router = new director.http.Router(routes)
app.start 8080

But this will just tell us ‘Unauthorized’ or… ‘Not found’.

To make it useful let’s redirect the user on success/failure using passport’s standard options, successRedirect and failureRedirect: (Note: for other ways, see this gist and comments)

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

routes =
    '/login':
        post:
            res = @res
            passport.authenticate('local',
                 successRedirect: '/members', failureRedirect: '/login'
            ) @req, @res, -> res.emit 'next'
2012-07-27As of version 0.3.4, [union][union] has `res.redirect` method built-it, so the hacks below are no longer necessary.

And it explodes:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14

node_modules/mongoose/lib/utils.js:413
        throw err;
              ^
TypeError: Object [object Object] has no method 'redirect'
    at Context.module.exports.delegate.fail (node_modules/passport/lib/passport/middleware/authenticate.js:119:20)
    at Context.actions.fail (node_modules/passport/lib/passport/context/http/actions.js:35:22)
    at verified (node_modules/passport-local/lib/passport-local/strategy.js:81:30)
    at Promise.app.use.before.stylus.middleware.src (test1.coffee:87:16)
    at Promise.addBack (node_modules/mongoose/lib/promise.js:120:8)
    at Promise.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:88:17)
    at Promise.emit (node_modules/mongoose/lib/promise.js:59:38)
    at Promise.complete (node_modules/mongoose/lib/promise.js:70:20)
    at Query.findOne (node_modules/mongoose/lib/query.js:856:30)
    at exports.tick (node_modules/mongoose/lib/utils.js:408:16)

It turns out that union doesn’t provide res.redirect method :( (see #34 and #36 for references). The way to get around this is to hack res.redirect in manually:

1
2
3
4
5
6

app = flatiron.app
app.before.push (req, res) ->
    res.redirect = (path) ->
        res.writeHead 302, 'Location': path
        res.end()
    res.emit 'next'

This way passport should be able to actually redirect the user to specified location.