jenca/jenca-authorization repository overview

⁠jenca-authorization

The authorization service for jenca-cloud.

This service decides if the user can perform the action they are attempting.

It is called after the authentication service and is provided with:

• the request URL
• the request method
• the request headers
• the data returned from the authentication step

⁠run tests

To run the tests get into the jenca-cloud dev environment (or anything that has a docker server).

Then:

$ make test

This will:

• use docker to spin up a postgres container
• run the tests in a container linked to postgres
• use docker to stop the postgres container

⁠run tests locally

If you want to run the tests using node on your host the process is a bit different.

Start postgres (do this whereever you have a Docker server):

$ make postgres

Run tests (do this whereever your native code is):

$ POSTGRES_HOST=172.17.8.150 npm test

Point the POSTGRES_HOST to whereever your tests can access a running postgres

⁠routes

⁠POST /v1/access

This route accepts JSON with the following keys:

• url
• method
• headers
• data
  • loggedIn
  • email

It should respond with the following JSON:

• error
• statusCode
• access

error if defined means the request will be denied - this text will be written as the body of the response

statusCode allows fine grained control over the response statusCode

access is written to all backend service requests as the x-jenca-access header. It should be a string (JSON or other) that services will use to decide on what access level.

⁠middleware

The router.js will accept a middleware argument and in this way the authorization logic is pluggable.

The middleware function has the following signature:

function(data, done){
  
}

data is the incoming JSON body (with url, method, headers and data fields). done is the callback with a signature of (error, reply)

reply is what is returned back to the jenca-router and should have (access, error and statusCode fields)

⁠CLI

The server is started with the following options:

var args = require('minimist')(process.argv, {
  alias:{
    p:'port',
    m:'middleware'
  },
  default:{
    port:process.env.PORT || 80,
    middleware:process.env.MIDDLEWARE || 'allowall'
  }
})

The port setting controls the TCP port the server listens on. The middleware setting controls which module from the middleware folder it will load. For example the following command would load the allowall middleware (middleware/allowall.js):

$ node index.js --middleware allowall