Basic HTTP authentication with Node and Express 4

Question

It looks like implementing basic HTTP authentication with Express v3 was trivial:

app.use(express.basicAuth('username', 'password'));

Version 4 (I'm using 4.2) removed the basicAuth middleware, though, so I'm a little stuck. I have the following code, but it doesn't cause the browser to prompt the user for credentials, which is what I'd like (and what I imagine the old method did):

app.use(function(req, res, next) {
    var user = auth(req);

    if (user === undefined || user['name'] !== 'username' || user['pass'] !== 'password') {
        res.writeHead(401, 'Access invalid for user', {'Content-Type' : 'text/plain'});
        res.end('Invalid credentials');
    } else {
        next();
    }
});

Answer 1

I used the code for the original basicAuth to find the answer:

app.use(function(req, res, next) {
    var user = auth(req);

    if (user === undefined || user['name'] !== 'username' || user['pass'] !== 'password') {
        res.statusCode = 401;
        res.setHeader('WWW-Authenticate', 'Basic realm="MyRealmName"');
        res.end('Unauthorized');
    } else {
        next();
    }
});

Answer 2

Express has removed this functionality and now recommends you use the basic-auth library.

Here's an example of how to use:

var http = require('http')
var auth = require('basic-auth')

// Create server
var server = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  var credentials = auth(req)

  if (!credentials || credentials.name !== 'aladdin' || credentials.pass !== 'opensesame') {
    res.statusCode = 401
    res.setHeader('WWW-Authenticate', 'Basic realm="example"')
    res.end('Access denied')
  } else {
    res.end('Access granted')
  }
})

// Listen
server.listen(3000)

To send a request to this route you need to include an Authorization header formatted for basic auth.

Sending a curl request first you must take the base64 encoding of name:pass or in this case aladdin:opensesame which is equal to YWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuc2VzYW1l

Your curl request will then look like:

 curl -H "Authorization: Basic YWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuc2VzYW1l" http://localhost:3000/