An example application of integrating Cerbos with an Express server using Prisma as the ORM. Cerbos helps you super-charge your authorization implementation by writing context-aware access control policies for your application resources. Author access rules using an intuitive YAML configuration language, use your Git-ops infrastructure to test and deploy them and, make simple API requests to the Cerbos PDP to evaluate the policies and make dynamic access decisions.
This is based on the REST API Express example from Prisma.
- Node.js
- Docker for running the Cerbos Policy Decision Point (PDP)
- Start up the Cerbos PDP instance docker container. This will be called by the express app to check authorization.
cd cerbos
./start.sh- Install node dependencies
npm install- Setup Prisma and seed the database
npx prisma migrate dev --name init
- Start the express server
npm run devThe Prisma seed command will create the following users in the database. Authentication is done via Basic authentication using the following credentials. The Role and Department is loaded from the database after successful authentication.
| ID | Username | Password | Role | Department |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | alice | supersecret | Admin | IT |
| 2 | john | password1234 | User | Sales |
| 3 | sarah | asdfghjkl | User | Sales |
| 4 | geri | pwd123 | User | Marketing |
This example has a simple CRUD policy in place for a resource kind of contact - like a CRM system would have. The policy file can be found in the cerbos/policies folder here.
Should you wish to experiment with this policy, you can try it in the Cerbos Playground.
The policy expects one of two roles to be set on the principal - admin and user and an attribute which defines their department as either IT, Sales or Marketing.
These roles are authorized as follows:
| Action | Role: User | Role: Admin |
|---|---|---|
read |
Only if department is Sales |
Y |
create |
Only if department is Sales |
Y |
update |
Only if they own the contact being accessed | Y |
delete |
Only if they own the contact being accessed | Y |
As a Sales user => 200 OK
curl -i http://john:password1234@localhost:3000/contacts
As a Marketing user => 403 Unauthorized
curl -i http://geri:pwd123@localhost:3000/contacts
As a Sales user => 200 OK
curl -i http://john:password1234@localhost:3000/contacts/1
As a Marketing user => 403 Unauthorized
curl -i http://geri:pwd123@localhost:3000/contacts/1