piral-oauth2

Piral OAuth 2.0 ·

This is a plugin that only has a peer dependency to piral-core. What piral-oauth2 brings to the table is a direct integration with OAuth 2.0 identity providers on basis of the client-oauth2 library that can be used with piral or piral-core.

The set includes the getAccessToken API to retrieve the current user's access token.

By default, these Pilet API extensions are not integrated in piral, so you'd need to add them to your Piral instance.

Why and When

If you are using authorization with an OAuth 2 provider then piral-oauth2 might be a useful plugin. It uses the client-oauth2 library under the hood and exposes token functionality in common HTTP mechanisms (e.g., using fetch or a library such as axios). Pilets can get the currently available token via the pilet API.

Alternatives: Use a plugin that is specific to your method of authentication (e.g., piral-auth for generic user management, piral-adal for Microsoft, piral-oidc for generic OpenID Connect, etc.) or just a library.

Documentation

The following functions are brought to the Pilet API.

getAccessToken()

Gets the currently authenticated user's token or undefined if no user is authenticated.

Usage

::: summary: For pilet authors

You can use the getAccessToken function from the Pilet API. This returns a promise.

Example use:

import { PiletApi } from '<name-of-piral-instance>';

export async function setup(piral: PiletApi) {
  const userToken = await piral.getAccessToken();
  // do something with userToken
}

Note that this value may change if the Piral instance supports an "on the fly" login (i.e., a login without redirect/reloading of the page).

:::

::: summary: For Piral instance developers

The provided library only brings API extensions for pilets to a Piral instance.

For the setup of the library itself you'll need to import createOAuth2Api from the piral-oauth2 package.

import { createOAuth2Api } from 'piral-oauth2';

The integration looks like:

import { createOAuth2Api, setupOAuth2Client } from 'piral-oauth2';

const client = setupOAuth2Client({ clientId, ... });

const instance = createInstance({
  // important part
  plugins: [createOAuth2Api(client)],
  // ...
});

The separation into setupOAuth2Client and createOAuth2Api was done to simplify the standard usage.

Normally, you would want to have different modules here. As an example consider the following code:

// module oauth2.ts
import { setupOAuth2Client } from 'piral-oauth2';

export const client = setupOAuth2Client({ ... });

// app.tsx
import * as React from 'react';
import { createOAuth2Api } from 'piral-oauth2';
import { createInstance } from 'piral-core';
import { client } from './oauth2';
import { render } from 'react-dom';

export function render() {
  const instance = createInstance({
    // ...
    plugins: [createOAuth2Api(client)],
  });
  render(<Piral instance={instance} />, document.querySelector('#app'));
}

// index.ts
import { client } from './oauth2';

if (location.pathname !== '/auth') {
  if (client.account()) {
    import('./app').then(({ render }) => render());
  } else {
    client.login();
  }
}

This way we evaluate the current path and act accordingly. Note that the actually used path may be different for your application.

The chosen OAuth 2 flow makes a difference. The example above works fine with the implicit flow (default). If you want to use the code flow then the integration looks a bit different.

Example integration using the code flow:

// index.ts
import { client } from './oauth2';

if (location.pathname !== '/auth') {
  client.login();
} else {
  client.token().then(
    // all good we are logged in
    () => import('./app').then(({ render }) => render()),
    // something went bad, we should show some error
    () => import('./error').then(({ render }) => render()),
  );
}

The code flow will automatically return from /auth to / once authenticated. Therefore, the application's routing does not have to consider /auth, which can remain a special path.

:::

License

Piral is released using the MIT license. For more information see the license file.