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doorkeeper

A simple and unobtrusive token management µ-service

This is a RESTful web service, written in javascript and built on top of Node.js

As token database backend an internal in-memory store (development) can be used or alternatively a redis store (production).

The doorkeeper service uses strictly tokens in JSON Web Token format.

This µ-service is intended as a starting point for the development of distributed web apps/services that need token-based verification. The architecture is designed in such a way that further required business logic can be easily inserted and extend the existing code base.

Another design decision of this service is the principle of minimalism. as little as possible is written into the database and if e.g. a token expires, it is also deleted from the database. this also applies to the logging (there are really only a few meaningful outputs in the production log) and no detailed error messages are sent to the client (this also benefits the security in the end)

so, let us build the next big thing and have fun 🚀

Project Status

⚠️ doorkeeper is intended for productive use - but so far only used in development environments. so attentiveness is required when using it in the wild.

✔️ this is open source - using the Apache License, Version 2.0. contributions, issue reports or pull requests are always welcome!

Table of Contents

How it works

The doorkeeper service knows two different types of tokens: The login token can be generated using a valid login id and a password. A login token can then be used to generate a session token. Such a session token can be used to authenticate api calls to your other web app/services.

Both tokens have a limited lifetime (expiration). While the session token is usually only valid for a short time (1 hour) the login token is different, it could be valid for much longer (e.g. 6 months), but expires after 7 days if the login token is not used to generate session tokens.

NOTE: all timeouts mentioned are of course customizable

In order to generate a login token, the doorkeeper service must rely on a (possibly external) user provider and on the store (a redis database).

When generating a session token based on a login token, the content of the login token is trusted and it is therefore no longer necessary to ask the user provider for it, but the store is still accessed (of course only login tokens issued by the service itself are trusted)

NOTE: The current implementation of the doorkeeper service uses a simple users.json file as user provider (at this point the developer is encouraged to add more enhanced user providers and extended login-is-valid verifications 😉)

The goal of the whole procedure is to give the client a valid session token that can be used to access other api calls from your actual web app services. The session token contains the uid, displayName and roles, these properties can be used by other services for authorization.

To decode and verify the content of the session token, the doorkeeper service is no longer necessary, this is possible from any other service, only the public token key from the doorkeeper is needed for verification.

NOTE: all tokens generated by the doorkeeper are cryptographically signed. this can be verified using the public token key. without the (secret) private token key, it should also not be possible for anyone else to generate valid tokens.

Login via Password

Login via password

Create Session Token

Create session token

Token Payload

A list of the data contained in the session token follows:

👉 at this point the hint that the doorkeeper service can and should be adapted and extended if these properties are not enough

key type source of truth description
iss string doorkeeper normally it is set to doorkeeper, but this is also customizable in config
toktyp string doorkeeper the token type. if this token is a session token it will always be session
sub string doorkeeper the login id which was used for the login
uid string user provider the user id — is provided by the user provider
displayName string user provider the public display name for the user. if the user provider does not specify a value here, then it will be the same as in sub
roles string[] user provider an array of string based permissions or roles. it is up to the respective application to interpret these permissions. the doorkeeper service currently only knows the admin role. if no roles have been assigned for this token, this field can also be undefined

Service Endpoints

Routes Overview

route method description
/token/login POST create login token
/token/session POST create session token
/token GET verify token and return payload as json
/tokens DELETE invalidate all login tokens

Create Login Token aka Login via Password

POST /token/login
parameter type in description
login string body login id
password string body login secret

Create a new login token. You will need to send the login and password parameters. The service will accept the parameters only as form or json encoded body data.

Returns a signed jwt token.


Create Session Token

POST /token/session
parameter type in description
Authorization string header login token

Create a new session token.

You need to pass your login token as header parameter: Authorization: Bearer XYZ123.

Returns a signed jwt token.


Verify Token

GET /token

Verify and return the token payload as json.

You need to pass your token (this can be either a login or a session token) as header parameter: Authorization: Bearer XYZ123.

parameter type in description
Authorization string header token

Returns the token payload data as json object.

Returns with an error (400 Bad Request) if the token can not be verified.


Destroy All Tokens

DELETE /tokens

Invalidate all login tokens. So all clients have to log in again when they want to create new session tokens.

NOTE: the existing session tokens will remain in place until they expire

You need to pass your session token as header parameter: Authorization: Bearer xyz123.

parameter type in description
Authorization string header jwt token

💂 SECURITY NOTE: for this api call the admin role must be present in the token data props under the roles key!


Configuration

For reading the config files node-config is used. All rules defined there apply.

The config files are located in the directory ./config/. It is accepted *.json but also *.yml formats.

Which files are loaded depends on the environment, respectively the environment variable NODE_ENV if this is not set, it is equivalent to NODE_ENV=development

Some config properties can also be set by environment variables, which are defined in custom-environment-variables.yml

Overview of the main settings

key type default value description
port number 6100 the http port for the doorkeeper service
log.pretty boolean true if true all log messages are in human readable form, otherwise a json format is used
log.httpRequests boolean false log all http requests. quite verbose. your decision if this is what you need
authKey string Authorization the http header parameter in which the token is expected
jwt.iss string doorkeeper when creating a token this value is entered as issuer
token.login.ttl number 1209600 the login token time to live in seconds. default is two weeks
token.login.lastLoginExpire number 604800 if a login token has not been used for this duration (specified in seconds), it is automatically invalidated (deleted from the store) so that a new login is required. default is 7 days
token.session.expiresIn string or number 1h the expiration for the session token. see here for a detailed format description
keyFile.public string keys/public.pem path to the public token key file. this key is needed by anyone who wants to verify the tokens. so it is safe and okay to make this key available to other services
keyFile.private string keys/private.pem path to the public token key file. this key is used to sign the tokens. this key should remain secret!
keyFile.passphrase string *** the passphrase for the private token key. you never know
users.staticUsersFile string config/users.json path to the users.json file. you should definitiv create your own users.json
users.passwordHashSecrets string[] *** the secrets used to encrypt the passwords in the users.json file. you should use scripts/set-user-secret.mjs to update or create users in a users.json file
tokenStore string redis in-memory and redis are the only possible stores at the moment
destroyAllTokensAtStartup boolean false yes, it does exactly what you think :) actually more suitable for testing

Redis store related settings

key type default value description
redis.client object { url: "redis://127.0.0.1" } the node-redis client config
redis.namespace string doorkeeeper.dev the prefix for all redis keys used by the doorkeeper service
redis.token.namespace string token the prefix for all token keys. a token key looks like this: doorkeeper.dev.token.{UID}
redis.user.namespace string user the prefix for all user keys. a user key looks for example like this: doorkeeper.dev.user.lastLoginTime.{UID}

Development

Setup

As a prerequisite, you need a node v16+ and a current docker environment installed.

$ npm install

Testing

Run npm test for running all tests from test/* against the local in-memory database.

Using npm run test:redis:run will use docker-compose to run all tests against a dockerized redis instance.

Or just use npm run test:all to run all tests against both environments (intended for ci).

For development npm run test:watch is meant, which only test against the in-memory database, but restarts the tests every time the sources have changed. very useful for development 😉

👉 NOTE: at the moment we use mocha as test runner and not jest because jest support for native es6 imports is still experimental AND jest runs incredibly slow in a docker context 😢

Generate Diagrams

The diagrams (in this README) are generated using Mermaid.js. To use mermaid, the docker image must first be loaded once: npm run pull-mermaid.

The diagrams (which can be found in ./docs/) are then generated with npm run generate-diagrams

Run a local server

In order to run a local server, you need to start a redis instance:

$ npm run dev:redis:up

After that, you can start a local server with:

$ npm start
# .. or use:
$ npm run watch

This will start a server listening on http://localhost:6100 and restart the application when a source file changed.

for the very lazy npm run dev is meant ... this starts both a redis instance and then immediately the server in watch mode

Build docker image

To create a release version and build the docker image, simply run:

$ npm run docker:build

Start the docker container with npm run docker:run (or use docker:start which starts the doorkeeper service in the background) or run an interactive shell session via npm run docker:run:shell

Publish docker image to the github container registry

After you build the docker image locally you can push it to the http://ghcr.io

1. Find out the docker image tag

$ docker images | grep doorkeeper

2. Tag the docker image

$ docker tag c958b8d5e94c ghcr.io/spearwolf/doorkeeper:latest

3. Push it to the registry

$ docker push ghcr.io/spearwolf/doorkeeper:latest

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a simple and unobtrusive token management µ-service

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