Hello all,

This is a new tutorial on Sails . Many of you were asking how to implement authentication in Sails. Here i’ve an awesome tool called Waterlock which enables easier authentication methods.

What is Waterlock ?

As its official website says , Waterlock is an all encompassing user authentication/json web token management tool, built for Sails. It provides user authentication , json webtokens and customisation.Waterlock provides you nice generators, so you can get up and running fast spend less time building structure and more time working on features!

So let’s get started.

Create a sails app

sails new authapp

Move to the Sails app directory.

Waterlock Installation

As every other node module , waterlock is also installed using npm. You have an advantage here, that this tool is exclusively built for Sails.

npm install waterlock

Authentication itself is handled via modular libraries, making Waterlock more lightweight. The current auth libraries are listed below.

Using Local Auth

Install local auth.

npm install waterlock-local-auth

Generate local auth

The executable script provided with Waterlock ./node_modules/.bin/waterlock gives you all the power you need to generate the different components of Waterlock.

Execute the command -

./node_modules/.bin/waterlock generate

You will see the list of resources Waterlock provides you.These are generated dynamically based on the auth method you have used. Let us choose all for now.

./node_modules/.bin/waterlock generate all

Now you can see the list of files generated by waterlock.

Let us see the config file now.You have following options

• baseUrl - this is the URL your app resides at, used in password reset urls
• jsonWebTokens - object containing information on how the jwt's should be constructed

Configure with your app secret.

Let us try authentication now. Create a new api post

sails generate api post

In Post Controller file add new function restricted as given below.

/**
 * PostController
 *
 * @description :: Server-side logic for managing posts
 * @help        :: See http://links.sailsjs.org/docs/controllers
 */

module.exports = {
	restricted:function(req,res){
		return res.ok("If You can see this you are authenticated");
	},	
	open:function(req,res){
		return res.ok("This is open to all!!!");
	}
};

Now let us apply some policies here . Sails uses basic sessionAuth. So we will add this to policies file in sails.

/**
 * Policy Mappings
 * (sails.config.policies)
 *
 * Policies are simple functions which run **before** your controllers.
 * You can apply one or more policies to a given controller, or protect
 * its actions individually.
 *
 * Any policy file (e.g. `api/policies/authenticated.js`) can be accessed
 * below by its filename, minus the extension, (e.g. "authenticated")
 *
 * For more information on configuring policies, check out:
 * http://sailsjs.org/#!documentation/
 */


module.exports.policies = {

  '*': true,
  PostController:{
  	restricted:['sessionAuth'],
  	open:true
  }
};

Let us lift the app again.Let us see what happens.

Let us go to http://localhost:1337/post/open You can see the following

Yeah !!! This is open to all users . So let us see what happens when we load our restricted page.

http://localhost:1337/post/restricted

Yeah!!! Authentication works. You see the restricted access page. So now let us create a user and check whether the authentication works correct.

Create a user

You can create a user by POSTing data to http://localhost:1337/auth/login.

I’ve used POSTMAN for creating a post request to the AuthController

You’ll be automatically logged in when you create a user. So let us check the restricted page once again.

Yeah!!! It works perfect. This was a tutorial developed on Session based authentication adapted from the Intro given by Waterlock. Let us see how to create a JSON token based authentication and create a complete user login/registration system with Waterlock,Angular and obiviously Sails in next tutorials.

So this is the end of this tutorial. Let us see in the next tutorial, bye :)