Authentication in Prisma - Part 3: Validation

When we create a token, we’re going to be giving it our user’s ID and then use that ID and jwt.verify to return data pertaining to that user if the verification was successful.

The first step is to set up our context to handle the headers from the user’s request. If we change our context parameter to a function, it will automatically have access to our request as an argument.

const server = new GraphQLServer({
  typeDefs: './schema.graphql',
  resolvers,
  context(req) { return { prisma, req } }
});

Now we should be able to destructure the req object out of our context. If you try logging req you’ll see that there is a request.headers which will contain the authorization we passed into the GraphQL Playground. This is what we’ll give to jwt.verify with our secret to check if that user is valid. Since we’ll be doing this for every resolver we want to secure, let’s make it a function.

It’s pretty straightforward; we’re just getting our token from the header, removing Bearer, so only the token is left, verify it, and return our user’s id.

const getUser = req => {
  const authorization = req.request.headers.authorization;

  if (!authorization) throw new Error('Authentication Required');
  else {
    const token = authorization.replace('Bearer ', '');
    const user = jwt.verify(token, process.env.TOKEN_SECRET);

    return user.userId;
  }
};

Let’s add a few new resolvers into our schema first. We’re just going to practice with a currentUser query, deleteAccount and updateUser mutations, and a myAccount subscription.

type Query {
  users: [User!]!
  currentUser: User!
}

type Mutation {
  createUser(data: CreateUserInput): User!
  loginUser(email: String!, password: String!): User!
  deleteAccount: User!
  updateUser(data: UpdateUserInput): User!
}

type Subscription {
  myAccount: AccountSubscription!
}

type User {
  id: ID!
  name: String!
  email: String!
  password: String! 
  token: String
}

input CreateUserInput {
  name: String! 
  email: String!
  password: String!
}

input UpdateUserInput {
  name: String 
  email: String
  password: String
}

enum MutationType {
  CREATED
  UPDATED 
  DELETED
}

type AccountSubscription {
  mutation: MutationType!
  node: User
}

Authentication is now going to be incredibly simple; just get our user’s id with getUser and pass that to where. Now it will return data for the user that’s logged in and only that user.

const Query = {
  users(parent, args, { prisma }, info) { ... },
  currentUser(parent, args, { req, prisma }, info) {
    const userID = getUser(req);

    return prisma.query.user({ where: { id: userID } }, info);
  }
};

Mutations are just as easy, except with updates, we’ll want to check if they’re changing their password first since we’ll need to rehash it first.

const Mutation = {
  async createUser(parent, { data }, { prisma }, info) { ... },
  async loginUser(parent, { email, password }, { prisma }, info) { ... },

  async deleteAccount(parent, args, { prisma, req }, info) {
    const userID = getUser(req);

    return prisma.mutation.deleteUser({ where: { id: userID } }, info);
  },
  async updateUser(parent, args, { prisma, req }, info) {
    const userID = getUser(req);

    if (typeof args.data.password === 'string') args.data.password = await bcrypt.hash(args.data.password, 10);

    return prisma.mutation.updateUser({
      where: { id: userID },
      data: args.data
    }, info);
  },
};

Subscriptions are just as self-explanatory once again, just remember to add Subscription to your resolvers in index.js.

const Subscription = {
  myAccount: {
    subscribe(parent, args, { prisma, req }, info) {
      const userID = getUser(req);

      return prisma.subscription.user({ where: { node: { id: userID } } }, info);
    }
  }
}

That may have seemed like a lot of work, but using authentication is by far the easiest part of the process. The important thing is to understand how it works, even though you’ll most likely use a starter boilerplate for most of your real projects.