Access Session Data From Ejs View

The generated project, now that you have installed dependencies, has the following file structure (files are the items not prefixed with "/"). The package.json file defines the application dependencies and other information. It also defines a startup script that will call the application entry point, the JavaScript file /bin/www. This sets up some of the application error handling and then loads app.js to do the rest of the work.

The app routes are stored in separate modules under the routes/ directory. The templates are stored under the /views directory. In part 1 of this tutorial, we discussed how to set up your Node.js project. In this tutorial, we will be going over setting up the required 'post' routes which are used every time an user logs in, registers, or logs out of our application. In addition, we'll create a local strategy for our passport integration and finish making our login and register functions. As the authentication is done using the OIDC protocol and authorization code flow, you will need two endpoints to properly handle it.

One that will initialize the process, and another one that will receive the code from the Curity Server and will exchange it for tokens. The endpoints are quite simple - all you have to do is tell the router that the passport middleware should be used on these paths. You can pass different options to the passport authenticate method. In the callback endpoint e.g. you tell passport to forward the user back to /login, should the authorization process fail. Finally the /callback endpoint also has a controller function. This is a regular Express controller method so anything you need can happen there.

In this example though you just redirect the user to their profile page. This code snippet first determines whether an authorization header was included in the HTTP request (accessible at req.headers.authorization). If no header was sent, we pass an error to the next() function, for Express to catch and process, i.e. sending the appropriate HTTP response. If an authorization header is present, we now extract the username and password (it is base64 encoded!) and determine whether they match user and password respectively. If they match, next() is called and the next middleware component processes the request, which in our app.js file is app.get("/wishlist",...).

First we add logger() so that it may wrap node's req.end() method, providing us with response-time data. Next the request's body will be parsed , followed by cookie parsing and session support, meaning req.session will be defined by the time we hit our routes in app.router. The views are stored in the /views directory (as specified in app.js) and are given the file extension .pug.

The method Response.render() is used to render a specified template along with the values of named variables passed in an object, and then send the result as a response. In the code below from /routes/index.js you can see how that route renders a response using the template "index" passing the template variable "title". You've added an authentication and authorization mechanism to your Express app. It's now easy to secure any page in your app - just check whether the user field is present in a req object.

If not, then redirect the user to login (or show an error, etc.). This works if you create an application with a frontend, e.g. a web page, because a session is needed to keep track of the logged in user. When a user sends a request to your web application, they will add a session cookie to the request headers. If this is the first time a user has requested your site, the server will create a new session cookie and return it to the client. The session is given an ID that both the client and server can reference. This enables the application to split the session data between that which is stored on the client-side and that which is stored on the server.

For example, the cookie may tell the application the session ID and that the user is authenticated. The server can use this information to access the user's shopping cart in the server's store. In the above example, you are registering the ExpressOIDC middleware provided by Okta to handle the login.

After the successful login, you redirect the users to the users/afterLogin router, which then has access to the request object. Express-session has attached the session object to the request for you and you can use the session API to call regenerate. This will create a new session for the logged-in users. Ejscript provides an Object Relational Mapping layer for accessing database data via convenient JavaScript objects. The ORM layer is a collection of database Model classes for the application. Controllers use this layer to access the database via these Model classes.

A typical paradigm is for action methods to read a database record and store the record in a public controller property. The view can then simply access the database data via this property. In this case, we'll use the tool to create the framework for our Local Library website, to which we'll later add all the other code needed by the site. If no course information is stored in the session or was sent with the request, route to index.html view.

Which parts of the configuration should be enclosed in this function? In Express the order in which middleware is applied to the request-response stack is important. You also have to remember that controllers are actually middleware that send the response to the requester. Thus every controller which should be protected by passport or will use the session data made available by passport should be registered inside this asynchronous function.

Middleware components can change the request and response objects.True. Middleware components can start the request-response cycle.False. Middleware components can call any middleware function in the middleware stack.False. Name three different routes, the following handler matches.

When a user uses your web application, they make an HTTP request to the webserver. The server then knows what to do with this request and returns a response. The user's request must contain all the necessary information for the server to make a decision.

Does the user have a shopping cart that needs to be displayed? All this information that makes the user experience feel seamless, as though he/she is using one continuous application, must be transmitted from the client to the server. If the application were to transmit all this data back and forth on each request, you would introduce massive security and performance concerns.

There are many ways to streamline this effort, but for the sake of this article, I will focus on cookie-based sessions. Then we require() modules from our routes directory. These modules/files contain code for handling particular sets of related "routes" . When we extend the skeleton application, for example to list all books in the library, we will add a new file for dealing with book-related routes. Middleware components are small, self-contained and reusable code pieces across applications.

Imagine you have written an Express application with tens of different routes and now decide to log every single HTTP request coming in. How exactly the latter works in Express is discussed now. OK, with nodejs installed, lets go ahead and install create-reacte-app.

Our plan is to create a temp app with allhe React app template code, then e'll copyover the package.json settings and load the packages into our main app. Once dependencies are installed, you will be ready to run your app locally. You'll notice that a package-lock.json file is generated when npm install is run. When subsequent dependencies are added, npm will make changes to this file, so be sure to add those changes to git too. Next, we create the app object using our imported express module, and then use it to set up the view engine.

First, we set the 'views' value to specify the folder where the templates will be stored (in this case the subfolder /views). Then we set the 'view engine' value to specify the template library (in this case "pug"). Res. locals is a property used to expose request-level information, such as the authenticated user and user settings. This information is then available to the views rendered during that request-response cycle, such as the templates that use the isAuthenticated variable. This route uses the jwtMiddleware, which is created using the express-jwt library. If the JWT token is not in the session, an error will be thrown and the user can't access the page.

With our server up and running, let's create some .ejs files in our view folder. Since we are following the MVC pattern, we need all our views, that is, what the end users see, to be in one folder. HTTP Form data is marshalled by Ejscript into the params object which is accessible to actions. Each HTML input element posted by the client will become a property of params. Ejscript can also organize form data into nested objects.

If an input element name contains a period, then Ejscript will create nested objects to match the input element name. So far, we have only used Node's REPL to show off some of EJS' capabilities. The REPL though is only for playing around with short code snippets, it does not bring us closer to a server-side script with templating enabled. It turns out that so-called views can be easily configured with Express. Not only that, an application can also make use of several template engines at the same time. On the try block, this function creates a new user with a hashed password, pushes it to our "users" array, and redirects the user to the login page.

The hashed password is stored inside of a variable called "hash". Of course, any time an application sends information to the client it could possibly end up in an enemy's hands. The majority of your users aren't necessarily bad actors, but bad actors are certainly looking for ways to exploit your application.

Most security concerns should be addressed by you, the developer and maintainer of the application and the developer of whatever session management library you're using. The route file /routes/users.js is shown below (route files share a similar structure, so we don't need to also show index.js). First, it loads the express module and uses it to get an express.Router object. Then it specifies a route on that object and lastly exports the router from the module (this is what allows the file to be imported into app.js). The next set of functions call app.use() to add the middleware libraries into the request handling chain. When next() is invoked the second middleware will then have it's turn and so on.

Another example of this is cookie parsing and session support, we must first use() cookieParser() followed by session()_. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to secure Node.js web application built with the Express framework. You'll use Passport.js with Auth0 to manage user authentication and protect routes of a client that consumes an API. The client is server-side rendered using Pug templates styled with CSS.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to implement this process in Node.js. You'll create a simple website that requires users to enable authentication with an authenticator app when they register and then to enter the code every time they log in. This doesn't only work with Google's Authenticator, but also with Microsoft's Authenticator, or any other TOTP authentication apps. This is a basic example showing how to implement session-based authentication with express-session, connect-redis and ejs. In the next article, I will share my learning on how to connect with mySQL database for storing username and password.

As mentioned in my previous article, this middleware creates a new session or get the existing session data from Redis store if the client's cookie has session ID. Hence, every user has session before entering any routes in our application. It depends on how you set up the express-session module.

All solutions store the session id in a cookie, and keep the data server-side. The client will receive the session id in a cookie, and will send it along with every HTTP request. This will cause the authorize to run before any action method except for the loginaction. The authorize function can test the user name and password and if not authorized, it can fail the request and redirect the user back to the login page. Filters can be run after the request by using the afterFilter method.

Next you have to tell passport how to keep the user data in a session and how to retrieve this data from the session. In this tutorial you just dump the user profile to the contents of the session cookie. This might not be the best practice in a production environment as you could end up with private user data in a cookie. You could use just the user ID in the serialization process, and then, when deserializing, read the data from a database based on the user ID from the cookie.

In this tutorial you just return the contents of the ID token as the user object. In a real life example this could be the place where you read user data from a database, or create a new user upon their first login to your application. One practice often recommended by developers designing and implementing modern applications recommends that your code should fail fast.

If an unexpected error occurs, do not try to handle it, rather let your program crash and have a supervisor restart it in a few seconds. The benefits of supervisor programs are not just limited to restarting crashed programs. These tools allow you to restart the program on crash, as well as restart them when some files change. This makes developing Node.js programs a much more pleasant experience. TransformUpper is a user-defined function that expects a string as input and transforms it to uppercase. The context object has a property helperFunc which is assigned a user-defined function as value.

In the template, we use the properties of the context object; ejs.render brings template and data together. This code snippet contains three handlers - and each handler will be used for about one third of all clients requesting /wishlist. What is important to understand when to call next and why in this setting we have to use a return statement—without it, the function's code would be continued to be executed.