Page Contents

Overview

Security is of paramount importance when developing a web or mobile application and usually consists of two distinct pieces:

  • Authentication
  • Authorization

Authentication is a process of verifying user/entity to the system, which enables identified/validated access to the protected routes.

Authorization is a process of deciding if a user can perform an action on a protected resource.

This document gives you an overview of the authentication system provided in LoopBack 4.

Let’s start with the following scenario: Suppose you want to limit access to todo items to the owner. The diagram below shows how such authentication process works with LoopBack’s authentication mechanism.

authentication_overview_request_handle_flow

As illustrated above, during the request GET /todo, an access token in the Authorization header is handled by the REST server’s sequence. The authentication action is then invoked to decode the user profile from token so that controllers can have the user injected.

To implement this, all you need to add is the code in the highlighted code snippet:

  • Register the authentication component and JWT extension in your application.
  • Enable the authenticate action in sequence.
  • Decorate the controller endpoint with @authenticate() and inject the user passed from the authentication layer.

The rest will be handled by the authentication component @loopback/authentication, which incorporates the authentication mechanism, and the JWT extension @loopback/authentication-jwt, which helps in implementing JWT-based authentication to the system and should be provided by extension developers.

Tutorials

The authentication system is highly extensible and pluggable. It’s easy to get started with. While there are more advanced features to explorer - of which are beneficial when you build more complicated and larger scale applications, it requires understanding the mechanics of the system, like how component @loopback/authentication works. To help you learn the full features gradually, we’ve broken down the documentations into several parts:

Examples

Here is a list of authentication related examples created by LoopBack team or contributed by community members: