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How Clients Authenticate

RESTHeart Cloud

Configuration

The URL and credentials the examples on this page use

localhost:8080 with admin:secret Saved in your browser

Setup Guide

Where to run the examples on this page

To run the examples on this page, you need a RESTHeart instance.

Option 1: Use Ulabase (Recommended)

The fastest way to get started is with Ulabase. Create a free service in minutes:

  1. Sign up at ulabase.com

  2. Create a free API service

  3. Set up your root user following the Root User Setup guide

  4. Use the configuration panel above to set your service URL and credentials

Tip
 All code examples on this page will automatically use your configured Ulabase credentials.

Option 2: Run RESTHeart Locally

If you prefer local development, follow the Setup Guide to install RESTHeart on your machine.

Note
 Local instances run at http://localhost:8080 with default credentials admin:secret

Introduction

Clients can authenticate passing credentials via the different authentication schemes handled by restheart-security. This section shows how clients can authenticate using the simple basic authentication, a standard method for an HTTP user agent to provide a username and password when making a request.

Some examples

Here’s how to authenticate with basic credentials:

cURL

curl -i --user [BASIC-AUTH] -X GET [RESTHEART-URL]/

HTTPie

http -a [BASIC-AUTH] GET [RESTHEART-URL]/

JavaScript

const username = 'your-username';
const password = 'your-password';
const credentials = btoa(`${username}:${password}`);

fetch('[RESTHEART-URL]/', {
    method: 'GET',
    headers: {
        'Authorization': `Basic ${credentials}`
    }
})
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => {
    console.log('Retrieved data:', data);
})
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));

Basic Authentication for dummies

Basic Authentication requires the client to send its credentials with the Authorization request header.

The value of the Authorization request header must be: Basic base64(<userid> + ':' + <password>)

In other words:

  1. userid and password are combined into a string "userid:password". Note the colon between userid and password (userid cannot contain the ":" character).

  2. The resulting string is base 64 encoded

  3. The string "Basic " (note the space) is then put before the encoded string.

Authentication Token

RESTHeart default configuration includes the tokenBasicAuthMechanism and the rndTokenManager.

With those plugins enabled, when a request is successfully authenticated, an auth token is generated by the Token Manager and included in every subsequent responses.

the tokenBasicAuthMechanism allows to authenticate the client using the auth token; the auth token is used as a temporary password in the basic authentication scheme. This means that the Authorization request header can either be calculated from the the Auth-Token itself:

Authorization: Basic base64(<userid> + ':' + <password>) or Authorization: Basic base64(<userid> + ':' + <auth-token>)

Auth token information are passed in the following response headers:

Auth-Token: 6a81d622-5e24-4d9e-adc0-e3f7f2d93ac7
Auth-Token-Location: /tokens/user@si.com
Auth-Token-Valid-Until: 2015-04-16T13:28:10.749Z
Note
 the URI in the Auth-Token-Location header: the client can issue a GET request to obtain information about token or a DELETE request to invalidate it. Of course clients can only request their own tokens (otherwise response code will be 403 Forbidden).

Token Management Examples

To get information about your auth token:

cURL

curl -i --user [BASIC-AUTH] -X GET [RESTHEART-URL]/tokens/userid

HTTPie

http GET [RESTHEART-URL]/tokens/userid Authorization:"Basic [BASIC-AUTH]"

JavaScript

const username = 'your-username';
const password = 'your-password';
const credentials = btoa(`${username}:${password}`);

fetch('[RESTHEART-URL]/tokens/userid', {
    method: 'GET',
    headers: {
        'Authorization': `Basic ${credentials}`
    }
})
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => {
    console.log('Token information:', data);
})
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));

To invalidate your auth token:

cURL

curl -i --user [BASIC-AUTH] -X DELETE [RESTHEART-URL]/tokens/userid

HTTPie

http DELETE [RESTHEART-URL]/tokens/userid Authorization:"Basic [BASIC-AUTH]"

JavaScript

const username = 'your-username';
const password = 'your-password';
const credentials = btoa(`${username}:${password}`);

fetch('[RESTHEART-URL]/tokens/userid', {
    method: 'DELETE',
    headers: {
        'Authorization': `Basic ${credentials}`
    }
})
.then(response => {
    if (response.ok) {
        console.log('Token invalidated successfully');
    } else {
        console.error('Failed to invalidate token:', response.status);
    }
})
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));
Tip
 The Authentication Token is a very important feature when you are developing a web application. Since every request needs to include the credentials, you need to store them either in a cookie or (better) in the session storage. The sign-in form can check the credentials using the actual password; if it succeeds, the auth token can be stored and used.
Warning
 Pay attention to the authentication token in case of multi-node deployments (horizontal scalability). In this case, you need to either disable it or use a load balancer with the sticky session option or a different Token Manager implementation.

The rndTokenManager can be configured as follows (note option TTL the auth token Time To Live in minutes):

rndTokenManager:
    ttl: 15
    srv-uri: /tokens

Suggested way to check credentials

The default restheart configuration file sets up the useful service roles, bound to /roles/<userid>

Here’s how to check credentials using the roles endpoint:

cURL

curl -i --user [BASIC-AUTH] -X GET [RESTHEART-URL]/roles/userid

HTTPie

http GET [RESTHEART-URL]/roles/userid Authorization:"Basic [BASIC-AUTH]"

JavaScript

const username = 'your-username';
const password = 'your-password';
const credentials = btoa(`${username}:${password}`);

fetch('[RESTHEART-URL]/roles/userid', {
    method: 'GET',
    headers: {
        'Authorization': `Basic ${credentials}`
    }
})
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => {
    console.log('User roles:', data);
})
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));

The possible response codes of the request GET /roles/<userid> are:

  • 401 Unauthorized missing or wrong credentials

  • 403 Forbidden the userid in the URL does not match the one in the Authorization header

  • 200 OK credentials match; the following response document is sent back:

 {
    "authenticated": true,
    "roles": [
        "USER"
    ]
}

Of course, if the request succeeds, the client gets back the auth token as well.

Note
 It is easy to check the user credentials from a login form with this handler: in case the client gets back 200, they match and the auth token can be stored for further request; otherwise passed credentials are wrong.

How to avoid the basic authentication popup in browsers

With basic authentication, browsers can show a awful login popup window and this is not what you usually want.

What happens behind the scene, is that the server sends the WWW-Authenticate response header that actually leads to it.

You can avoid RESTHeart to actually send this header avoiding the popup login window altogether, either specifying the No-Auth-Challenge request header or using the noauthchallenge query parameter. In this case, RESTHeart will just respond with 401 Unauthorized in case of missing or wrong credentials.

Tip
 This feature together with the authentication token, allows you to implement a form based authentication experience on top of the simple and effective basic authentication mechanism.
Tip
 Watch An application example (blog)