@easyweb/authentication

Shared authentication primitives for Easyweb microservices — stateless JWT middleware, request-context middleware, and the token verification helpers services build on.

Companion to @easyweb/events for messaging, and @easyweb/errors for the HTTP error taxonomy.

2.1.0 — SUPER_ADMIN now satisfies authorize(["ADMIN"])

authorize() was an exact string match. Every admin route in the platform is written authorize(["ADMIN"]), and auth-service's admin-seed.ts grants the bootstrap operator SUPER_ADMIN by default — so the seeded account could not call a single admin route on the platform.

SUPER_ADMIN now implies ADMIN. Nothing else implies anything: ADMIN deliberately does not imply USER, because that edge would silently widen every future customer route to staff.

Additive, and widening only. A service still on 2.0.0 behaves exactly as it did — SUPER_ADMIN simply stays locked out there — so this needs no coordinated deploy. Since every service declares ^2.0.0 but installs from a lockfile, pick it up with:

npm i @easyweb/authentication@^2.1.0

The new effectiveRoles(roles) export does the same expansion for a service with its own guard (auth-service's DB-backed middleware, in particular).

The status is unchanged: authorize() still throws NotAuthorizedError, which is 401 even for a signed-in caller with the wrong role. Every service's http suite pins that. A caller needing to tell "not signed in" from "not permitted" must check the role itself.

Upgrading to 2.0.0 — BREAKING

The error classes moved to @easyweb/errors. Error handling is cross-cutting and has nothing to do with JWTs; a service needing ConflictError should not have to depend on an auth package for it.

- import { NotAuthorizedError } from "@easyweb/authentication";
+ import { NotAuthorizedError } from "@easyweb/errors";

@easyweb/errors is a peerDependency — install it alongside this package. Do not let it end up nested under node_modules/@easyweb/authentication/: two copies of CustomError means instanceof fails across the boundary and the error handler answers 500 for everything, with no type error to warn you. Verify with npm ls @easyweb/errors.

Also new in 2.0.0: extractToken and isValidAccessPayload are exported, for services that keep their own DB-backed middleware (see below) and would otherwise copy them.

Install

npm install @easyweb/authentication

express@^5 and jsonwebtoken@^9 are peer dependencies — the consuming service provides them.

Usage

Nothing in this package reads process.env. Config is bound once at startup, so the package never has to reach into a service's config module.

import express from "express";
import cookieParser from "cookie-parser";
import { createAuthMiddleware, requestContext } from "@easyweb/authentication";
import config from "./config";

const app = express();
app.use(cookieParser()); // required: the middleware reads the accessToken cookie
app.use(requestContext);

const authMiddleware = createAuthMiddleware(config.jwt);
// config.jwt must supply { secret, issuer, audience } matching auth-service's

app.get("/me", authMiddleware.authenticate, (req, res) => {
  res.json(req.user); // { id, email, username, roles, permissions }
});

app.get("/feed", authMiddleware.optionalAuth, (req, res) => {
  res.json({ personalised: Boolean(req.user) });
});

app.delete(
  "/admin/:id",
  authMiddleware.authenticate,
  authMiddleware.authorize(["admin"]),
  handler,
);

Minting tokens (auth-service only):

import { createJwtSigner } from "@easyweb/authentication";

const signAccessToken = createJwtSigner(config.jwt);
// config.jwt additionally needs accessTokenTtlSeconds

What it verifies — and what it does not

authenticate is stateless. It checks the signature, issuer, audience, expiry, and that the payload is a well-formed access token. It performs no database lookup.

A logout or session revoke in auth-service stays invisible here until the access token expires (JWT_ACCESS_TOKEN_TTL_SECONDS, currently 300). If a service needs immediate revocation, it must keep its own DB-backed middleware — auth-service does exactly that.

req.user.permissions is always []. The access token carries no permissions claim; auth-service resolves those from its own tables at request time. Guarding on this array would deny every request.

Exports

extractToken and isValidAccessPayload exist for services that must keep a DB-backed middleware. They were previously private, so auth-service copied them — and the copies drifted. If you need the same checks with different error messages, import these rather than reimplementing them.

Importing the package also augments Express.Request with user, auth, and requestId. Remove any local copy of that declare global block or TypeScript will report duplicate members.

Token contract

JwtAccessPayload is the only shape the services agree on. Changing it breaks every consumer — bump the major version.

License

MIT