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LoopBack does not define a default administrator user, however you can define one when the application starts, as illustrated in the loopback-example-access-control example. Specifically, the example includes code in server/boot/sample-models.js that:

  • Creates several users, along with instances of other models
  • Defines relations among the models.
  • Defines an admin role,
  • Adds a role mapping to assign one of the users to the admin role.

Because this script is in server/boot, it is executed when the application starts up, so the admin user will always exist once the app initializes.

The following code creates three users named “John,” “Jane,” and “Bob, then (skipping the code that creates projects, project owners, and project team members) defines an “admin” role, and makes Bob an admin:

/server/boot/script.js

User.create([
    {username: 'John', email: 'john@doe.com', password: 'opensesame'},
    {username: 'Jane', email: 'jane@doe.com', password: 'opensesame'},
    {username: 'Bob', email: 'bob@projects.com', password: 'opensesame'}
], function(err, users) {
    if (err) return debug('%j', err);
    //...
    // Create projects, assign project owners and project team members
    //...
    // Create the admin role
    Role.create({
      name: 'admin'
    }, function(err, role) {
      if (err) return debug(err);
      debug(role);

      // Make Bob an admin
      role.principals.create({
        principalType: RoleMapping.USER,
        principalId: users[2].id
      }, function(err, principal) {
        if (err) return debug(err);
        debug(principal);
      });
    });
  });
};

The model JSON (created by the ACL generator)  file specifies that the admin role has unrestricted access to view projects (GET /api/projects):

/common/models/model.json

...
{
  "accessType": "READ",
  "principalType": "ROLE",
  "principalId": "admin",
  "permission": "ALLOW",
  "property": "find"
},
...