Node User Service

This service authenticates users against records in a MongoDB. When authenticated, users are issued a JWT token with a set of claims describing operations a user can perform. It's designed to be used in a microservice architecture where claims are defined by associated services other than a core claims for managing users and claims.

Microservice Collection

This project is part of a collection of microservices for supporting a larger project.

Getting Started

Install Prerequisites

Required

The application was tested with these major versions:

• MongoDB 4.2
• Node.js 14 & 16

Recommended

• Docker
• Kubernetes Provider

This package doesn't target any specific platform or provider. Sample files for Kubernetes deployment are included.

cd node-user-service
npm install

Database

Create the user service database and a user that can access it.

use userServiceDB
db.createUser(
  {
    user: "userService",
    pwd: "[STRONG PASSWORD]",
    roles: [
      { role: "readWrite", db: "userServiceDB" }
    ]
  }
)

Initial Data

To add users and authorization claims, populate a yaml file with seed claims and users. See SampleClaims.yaml and SampleUsers.yaml for an example of the data format. Seed the database with the initial user and claims.

npm run addClaims -- MyClaims.yaml
npm run addUsers -- MyUsers.yaml

Config

You will need to generate a private/public key pair. This is used to sign the JWT tokens. The node-user-service uses the private key to sign while the consuming services will use the public key to validate.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -m PEM -f jwtRS256.key
openssl rsa -in jwtRS256.key -pubout -outform PEM -out jwtRS256.key.pub

A few environmental variables are required for the application to run. Create a .env file in the root of the project directory and refer to template.env for allowed values.

cp template.env .env
# Edit .env

The application should now be runnable locally.

npm start

Deployment

Docker

Docker isn't required to run this service, but in a microservice architecture, use of containers has become ubiquitous. Create the Docker image and push it up to a Docker registry.

docker build -t linkedmink/node-user-service
docker push linkedmink/node-user-service

You can run the images directly for testing or simplicity.

docker run -d \
  -p 80:8080 \
  -e ALLOWED_ORIGINS=https://mydomain.com \
  -e MONGO_DB_CONNECTION_STRING=... \
  -e JWT_SECRET_KEY_FILE=... \
  -e JWT_AUDIENCE=... \
  -e JWT_ISSUER=... \
  --name node-user-service \
  linkedmink/node-user-service

Kubernetes

The project contains a sample deployment.yaml file for deploying to a Kubernetes cluster. Edit the file as necessary. Then apply the changes to your cluster.

kubectl create secret generic jwt-private-key \
  --namespace necro-automobilia \
  --from-file=../../keys/jwtRS256.key

kubectl apply -f ./deployment.yaml

Additionally, there's a basic build script that constructs a multi-platform docker image and rolls out the latest version to a Kubernetes cluster.

# Edit build.sh or supply environment variables to override
KUBERNETES_NAMESPACE=my-app deploy/k8s-build.sh deploy