basic_authentication.md

Basic Authentication with Vapor

back to index

To manage login, you can use the Basic Authentication protocol (RFC 7617) which is supported by Vapor 3 by default

Principle

you have a username and a password that you combined like so:

 admin:password

then, you base64-encode them:

 YWRtaW46cGFzc3dvcmQK==

and you submit it in your HTTP Header like so:

 Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46cGFzc3dvcmQK==

How to implement using Vapor framework

Setup

First, you need to add the Authentication package in your SPM config (github: vapor/auth)

.package(url: "https://github.com/vapor/auth.git",
		 from: "2.0.0-rc")

dependencies: [...,
			   "Authentication"]

Configuration

In your configure.swift file, add the following line:

try services.register(AuthenticationProvider())

And in any file where you add some auth code, don't forget to import the module:

import Authentication

Model Conformance

Assuming you have a User model object with at least two properties username and password, you need to make this model conforms to BasicAuthenticatable protocol by defining the keypath of the two properties:

extension User: BasicAuthenticatable {
  static let usernameKey: UsernameKey = \User.username
  static let passwordKey: PasswordKey = \User.password
}

Routing

In your routing code, you need to create two middlewares that will be responsible for intercepting each request and check if it is correctly authorized:

let basicAuthMiddleware =
  User.basicAuthMiddleware(using: BCryptDigest())
let guardAuthMiddleware = User.guardAuthMiddleware()

Note: the basic auth middleware will using BCrypt hashing to verify the password. These lines can be added directly next to your routes definitions.

Then you need to create a group of routes managed by those two middlewares:

let protectedRoutes = router.grouped(
  basicAuthMiddleware,
  guardAuthMiddleware)
// you can now use protectedRoutes to manage your routes that require authentication with basic Auth
protectedRoutes.post("login", use: loginHandler)

User creation

When creating your user, you need to hash your password. You can simple use the standard BCrypt hashing like that:

import Crypto

let user = getUser(...)
user.password = try BCrypt.hash(user.password)
user.save(on: dbconnection)

References

• Server Side Swift with Vapor" ebook, section III, chapter 18)

back to index