authentication.md

Authentication

The GunPlus wraps gun's user authentication to achieve primarily two things:

• Make authentication into promises.

• Use a state machine

It is possible to subscribe to updates from GunPlus.auth_state. This state will be kept in sync using a state machine with the transistions defined below:

graph TD;
disconnected-->|create|creating;
disconnected-->|authenticate|pending;
creating-->|fail|disconnected;
creating-->|success|disconnected;
pending-->|fail|disconnected;
pending-->|success|authorized;
authorized-->|disconnect|leaving;
leaving-->|fail|authorized;
leaving-->|success|disconnected;

Usage

You can do authentication like so:

GunPlus.auth_state.subscribe(state => console.log(state));
try{
	await GunPlus.auth(pair)
}catch(err){
	console.warn(err);
}

Types

You might notice that the functions in GunPlus.auth work with GunAlias and GunPassword values. The are really just strings, but you must get them through the GunPlus.auth.validate function.

This function may in the future run more advanced asyncronous logic to decide if a given alias/password pair is valid. Currently it just:

• checks that the password is more than 8 characters long, since this is the minimum length accepted by gun.
• scopes users to the app scope specified in GunPlus.

---

If you need to access the user chain, e.g for putting a reference to the user on the graph, you should access this through GunPlus.instance.user.chain instead of GunPlus.instance.gun.user(). This will ensure that a public key can be inferred from the user, i.e. gun.user() is NOT the same thing as a regular gun chain, while GunPlus.instance.user.chain is.

Errors

Attempting to make a transition that is not explicitly defined will throw a StateTransitionError . This error has

• a state property indicating what the state was at the time the error was thrown.
• and a event property with the type of the event that was attempted to make a transition for on that state.