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Liquid is a Docker-based open-source authentication server that supercharges your product development by offering out of the box APIs for features like follow-unfollow, blocking, and banning so that you can focus on just your application logic. 🚀

Think of Liquid like integrating a readymade authentication and user management server with your own codebase. You just boot up Liquid in a docker container with a few configuration files and it is all good to go.

Quick Start

If you're looking for the quickest and most convenient way to run Liquid without installing manually the dependencies for database and cache by yourself, do the following:

1. Run

curl -sSL --insecure https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shrihari-prakash/liquid/main/quickstart/docker-compose.yaml > docker-compose.yaml
curl -sSL --insecure https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shrihari-prakash/liquid/main/quickstart/app-config.service.json > app-config.service.json
curl -sSL --insecure https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shrihari-prakash/liquid/main/quickstart/app-config.static.json > app-config.static.json

2. In the app-config.service.json file, add your frontend origin in cors.allowed-origins array.
3. Run docker-compose up -d.

This is useful if you want to try and evaluate Liquid to see if it fits your needs or to locally develop your apps with Liquid.

Connecting Your Frontend Application to Liquid Quickstart Instance

For Liquid to securely allow your frontend to authenticate, you will need to update your frontend domain in a few places:

Nitrogen Configuration

1. Login to the Nitrogen admin panel.
2. Navigate to the Applications tab.
3. Click the Edit button.
4. In the redirect URIs section, add your frontend origin.
5. Press Enter.
6. Click Save.

Test connectivity

1. Navigate to http://localhost:2000?redirect_uri=https://your-frontend.origin
2. Enter the login details and click on Login.
3. You are now navigated back to your application with the state and code parameters in the URL.
4. Refer to this section to see how to get an access token from the code in URL to call Liquid APIs.

The Quickstart script by default runs in "Demo Mode", which means, an application and a user is already created for you so that you can jump straight into evaluating Liquid with zero configuration. The script also comes with the Nitrogen admin panel preconfigured. You can manage users and permissions by navigating to http://localhost:2001.

Demo user

Username: liquid_demo

Password: liquid_demo

Connecting Your Backend Service to Liquid Quickstart Instance

Refer to this section to find out how to authenticate users connecting to your service using Liquid.

Important

You should NEVER use the Quickstart for production deployments. For production usage, please read this page further and after the first time setup, refer to the Production Guide to make your instance production ready.

Production Setup

Before you start

There are a few dependencies for Liquid to run as intented.

First of all, you need MongoDB and Redis instances running. Redis is not absolutely required, but it is highly recommended that you have it. You can disable Redis by disabling the option privilege.can-use-cache, but again, it is not recommended.

Secondly, you need a SendGrid account, because this is how Liquid sends emails to verify user accounts and reset account passwords. If you do not have a SendGrid account right away, you can disable SendGrid usage by disabling the following options: user.account-creation.require-email-verification (backend & frontend), privilege.can-reset-password (frontend). As you might have noticed, this will bypass email verifications when users are signing up and will also disable the forgot password button. Disabling these can be useful for development purposes.

Full list of dependencies

Almost everything is optional except MongoDB.

Dependency	Optional	Used by Default	Related Options	Disable Recommended?
MongoDB	No	Yes	mongo-db.connection-string	No
Redis	Yes	Yes	privilege.can-use-cache, redis.*	No
SendGrid	Yes	Yes	user.account-creation.require-email-verification (backend & frontend), privilege.can-reset-password (frontend), sendgrid.*	No
AWS S3 (or) S3 like storage	Yes	No	privilege.can-use-profile-picture-apis, s3.*	Yes
RabbitMQ	Yes	No	privilege.can-use-push-events, privilege.can-use-rabbitmq, rabbitmq.*	Yes

The basics

There are a few configuration files required for liquid to function:

1. app-config.json: The frontend configuration file. This controls everything that the user sees in pages like login, signup, etc. Heavily used for cosmetic changes, but also controls enabling and disabling certain features shown in forms.
2. .env: The backend configuration file. This is the file where all your important liquid configurations and secrets are stored. Like MongoDB URL, Redis credentials, what features to enable in the system, etc.
3. scope-extensions.json: The scopes file (Optional). OAuth systems usually determine if a user is allowed to access an API by checking if they have access to the scope associated with the API. More about this later.

Editing Liquid configurations

Backend

All the available backend options are listed in this file.

To configure options, create a file named app-config.service.json. Now copy the name field of the option you want to configure to the JSON file and set the intended value.

Here's a sample app-config.service.json file for a very minimal Liquid setup:

{
  "environment": "development",
  "cookie.secure": true,
  "cors.allowed-origins": ["http://localhost:2001", "https://your.frontend.origin"],
  "mongo-db.connection-string": "mongodb://localhost:27017/liquid",
  "redis.port": 6379,
  "redis.host": "127.0.0.1",
  "redis.db": 0,
  "system.app-name": "Liquid",
  "system.static.app-config-file-path": "/environment/app-config.static.json",
  "privilege.can-reset-password": false,
  "user.account-creation.require-email-verification": false,
  "system.email-adapter": "print",
  "system.rate-limit.light-api-max-limit": 100000000,
  "system.rate-limit.medium-api-max-limit": 100000000,
  "system.rate-limit.heavy-api-max-limit": 100000000,
  "system.rate-limit.extreme-api-max-limit": 100000000,
  "system.demo-mode": true
}

Frontend

All the available options are listed in this file.

When you want to configure an option, you would copy the name field of the option and set it in app-config.static.json.

Here's a sample app-config.static.json file:

{
  "oauth.client-id": "application_client",
  "oauth.redirect-uri": "{{your-default-oauth-redirect-uri}}",
  "content.app-name": "My App",
  "content.app-tagline": "My App Tagline."
}

Installation

Now that we have our configuration files ready, let's boot up liquid with them.

1. Pull the docker image by using command docker pull shrihariprakash/liquid.
2. Create a collection in your database named clients and insert the following document into the collection (Make sure you edit the frontend URIs and secret in the document below):

{
  "id": "application_client",
  "grants": ["client_credentials", "authorization_code", "refresh_token"],
  "redirectUris": [
    "{{frontend-redirect-uri-1}}",
    "{{frontend-redirect-uri-2}}"
  ],
  "secret": "super-secure-client-secret",
  "role": "internal_client",
  "scope": ["*"],
  "displayName": "Application Client"
}

3. Update properties oauth.client-id and oauth.redirect-uri in your app-config.json to values from the document you just inserted into clients collection. Feel free to explore other options related to UI customizations.
4. Have your backend configurations ready in the file .env (preferably put it on the same folder as your app-config.json).
5. Now open terminal in the folder that contains your app-config.json and .env.
6. If you are on Windows, run:

docker run -p 2000:2000 -v "%cd%":/environment --env "SYSTEM_SERVICE_APP_CONFIG_FILE_PATH=/environment/app-config.service.json" --name liquid -itd shrihariprakash/liquid:latest

7. If you are on Linux, run

docker run -p 2000:2000 -v "$(pwd)":/environment --env "SYSTEM_SERVICE_APP_CONFIG_FILE_PATH=/environment/app-config.service.json" --name liquid -itd shrihariprakash/liquid:latest

8. Alternatively, you can use docker compose for easy restarts:

version: "3"
services:
  liquid:
    image: shrihariprakash/liquid:latest
    container_name: liquid
    ports:
      - "2000:2000"
    volumes:
      - .:/environment # Replace . with the folder that contains app-config.json and .env
    env_file:
      - .env

9. All done ✨, navigating to host-machine:2000 should render login page. All the APIs are ready to be called from your other services. If the rest of your project is running on Node, you can use the Liquid Node Connector to authenticate users connecting to your service and also to get client tokens to interact with Liquid client APIs. Click here for Swagger. Also see Sign Up and Login section in the bottom of this document to find how to handle redirects from your app for authentication.
10. As a general best practice, whenever you launch Liquid, always look for any warnings in the logs. This can help you catch misconfigurations very early before your users notice them.

First time setup

Now we have our liquid instance running. That's fantastic! There's just one more thing to do. Assign someone as the system administrator. Liquid needs a super admin for the system that can provide access to all other users in the system. To do this, create an account on Liquid by doing the following:

1. Visit /signup and fill the details.
2. Click on Create Account.
3. If you have email verifications enabled, a code is sent to your email. Enter this code on the verification page. If you have verifications disabled, you are redirected to the login page. DO NOT LOGIN YET!.

Once you sign up for an account, you would need to make yourself super admin by editing the database entry for your account. This is the last time you will touch the database manually. Run the following commands in your MongoDB instance:

use liquid

db.users.updateOne( { username: "your_username" },
{
  $set: {
    role: "super_admin",
    scope: ["*"]
  }
})

This would give you full access to the system.

Login

1. To authenticate with liquid, redirect to /login?redirect={{your_target_uri}}&theme={{light | dark}} from your app (or you could just visit the login URL) and enter your credentials. Note that the value of redirect parameter must be one of the values configured in redirectUris of Setup(2).
2. If the credentials are correct, the application redirects the control to the url specified in redirect parameter with the state and authorization code.
3. In your application logic, you can use this code in exchange for an access and refresh token using the authorization_code grant.

To make Liquid production ready, continue to the Production Guide

API Documentation

Get started with the APIs here