Category: Projects

Next in the Multi Tenant Node-RED series is authentication.

If you are going to run a multi user environment one of the key features will be identifying which users are allowed to do what and where. We need to only allow users to access their specific instances of Node-RED.

Node-RED provides a couple of options, the simplest is just to include the username/password/permissions details directly in the settings.js but this doesn’t allow for dynamic updates like adding/removing users or changing passwords.

// Securing Node-RED
// -----------------
// To password protect the Node-RED editor and admin API, the following
// property can be used. See http://nodered.org/docs/security.html for details.
adminAuth: {
    type: "credentials",
    users: [{
        username: "admin",
        password: "$2a$08$zZWtXTja0fB1pzD4sHCMyOCMYz2Z6dNbM6tl8sJogENOMcxWV9DN.",
        permissions: "*"
    }]
},

The documentation also explains how to use PassportJS strategies to authenticate against oAuth providers, meaning you can do things like have users sign in with their Twitter credentials or use an existing Single Sign On solution if you want.

And finally the documentation covers how to implement your own authentication plugin, which is what I’m going to cover in this post.

In the past I have built a version of this type of plugin that uses LDAP but in this case I’ll be using MongoDB. I’ll be using the same database that I used in the last post about building a storage plugin. I’m also going to use Mongoose to wrap the collections and I’ll be using the passport-local-mongoose plugin to handle the password hashing.

const mongoose = require('mongoose');
const Schema = mongoose.Schema;
const passportLocalMongoose = require('passport-local-mongoose');

const Users = new Schema({
  appname: String,
  username: String,
  email: String,
  permissions: { type: String, default: '*' },
});

var options = {
  usernameUnique: true,
  saltlen: 12,
  keylen: 24,
  iterations: 901,
  encoding: 'base64'
};

Users.plugin(passportLocalMongoose,options);
Users.set('toObject', {getters: true});
Users.set('toJSON', {getters: true});

module.exports = mongoose.model('Users',Users);

We need the username and permissions fields for Node-RED, the appname is the same as in the storage plugin to allow us to keep the details for multiple Node-RED instances in the same collection. I added the email field as a way to contact the user if we need do something like a password reset. You can see that there is no password field, this is all handled by the passport-local-mongoose code, it injects salt and hash fields into the schema and adds methods like authenticate(password) to the returned objects that will check a supplied password against the stored hash.

Required API

There are 3 function that need to be implemented for Node-RED

users(username)

This function just checks if a given user exists for this instance

  users: function(username) {
    return new Promise(function (resolve, reject){
      Users.findOne({appname: appname, username: username}, {username: 1, permissions: 1})
      .then(user => {
        resolve({username:user.username, permissions:user.permissions);
      })
      .catch(err => {
        reject(err)
      })
    });
  },

authenticate(username, password)

This does the actual checking of the supplied password against the database. It looks up the user with the username and appname and then has passport-local-mongo check it against the hash in the database.

authenticate: function(username, password) {
      return new Promise(function(resolve, reject){
        Users.findOne({appname: appname, username})
        .then((user) => {
          user.authenticate(password, function(e,u,pe){
            if (u) {
              resolve({username: u.username, permissions: u.permissions)
            } else {
              resolve(null);
            }
          })
        })
        .catch(err => {
          reject(err)
        })
      }) 
  },

default()

In this case we don’t want a default user so we just return a null object.

default: function() {
    return Promise.resolve(null);
  }

Extra functions

setup(settings)

Since authentication plugins do not get the whole setting object passed in like the storage plugins we need include a setup() function to allow details about the MongoDB to be passed in.

type: "credentials",
setup: function(settings) {
  if (settings && settings.mongoURI) {
    appname = settings.appname;
    mongoose.connect(settings.mongoURI, mongoose_options)
    .catch(err => {
      throw err;
    });
  }
  return this;
},

Using the plugin

This is again similar to the storage plugin where an entry is made in the settings.js file. The difference is that this time the settings object isn’t explicitly passed to the plugin so we need to include the call to setup in the entry.

...
adminAuth: require('node-red-contrib-auth-mongodb').setup({
   mongoURI: "mongodb://localhost/nodered",
   appname: "r1"
})

How to add users to the database will be covered in a later post about managing the creation of new instances.

Source code

You can find the code here and it’s on npmjs here

As part of my series of posts about the components needed to build a Multi Tenant Node-RED system in this post I’ll talk about writing a plugin to store the users flow in the database rather than on disk.

There are a number of existing Storage plugins, the default local filessystem, the CloudantDB plugin that is used with Node-RED in the IBM Cloud.

I’m going to use MongoDB as the backend storage and the Mongoose library to wrap the reading/writing to the database (I’ll be reusing the Mongoose schema definiations later in the Authentication plugin and the app to manager Node-RED instances).

The documentation from the Storage API can be found here. There are a number of methods that a plugin needs to provide:

init()

This sets up the plugin, it reads the settings and then opens the connection to the database.

init: function(nrSettings) {
  settings = nrSettings.mongodbSettings || {};

  if (!settings) {
    var err = Promise.reject("No MongoDB settings for flow storage found");
    err.catch(err => {});
    return err;
  }

  appname = settings.appname;

  return new Promise(function(resolve, reject){
    mongoose.connect(settings.mongoURI, mongoose_options)
    .then(() => {
      resolve();
    })
    .catch(err => {
      reject(err);
    });
  })
},

getFlows()/saveFlows(flows)

Here we retrieve/save the flow to the database. If there isn’t a current flow (such as the first time the instance is run) we need to return an empty array ([])

getFlows: function() {
  return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
    Flows.findOne({appname: appname}, function(err, flows){
      if (err) {
        reject(err);
      } else {
        if (flows){
          resolve(flows.flow);
        } else {
          resolve([]);
        }
      }
    })
  })
},
saveFlows: function(flows) {
  return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
    Flows.findOneAndUpdate({appname: appname},{flow: flows}, {upsert: true}, function(err,flow){
      if (err) {
        reject(err)
      } else {
        resolve();
      }
    })
  })
},

The upsert: true in the options passed to findOneAndUpdatet() triggers an insert if there isn’t an existing matching document.

getCredentials/saveCredentials(credentials)

Here we had to convert the credentials object to a string because MongoDB doesn’t like root object keys that start with a $ (the encrypted credentials string is held in the $_ entry in the object.

getCredentials: function() {
  return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
    Credentials.findOne({appname: appname}, function(err, creds){
      if (err) {
        reject(err);
      } else {
        if (creds){
          resolve(JSON.parse(creds.credentials));
        } else {
          resolve({});  
        }
      }
    })
  })
},
saveCredentials: function(credentials) {
  return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
    Credentials.findOneAndUpdate({appname: appname},{credentials: JSON.stringify(credentials)}, {upsert: true}, function(err,credentials){
      if (err) {
        reject(err)
      } else {
        resolve();
      }
    })
  })
},

getSessions()/saveSessions(sessions)/getSettings()/saveSettings(settings)

These are pretty much just carbon copies of the getFlows()/saveFlows(flows) functions since they are just storing/retrieving a single JSON object.

getLibraryEntry(type,name)/saveLibraryEntry(type,name,meta,body)

saveLibraryEntry(type,name,meta,body) is pretty standard with a little bit of name manipulation to make it look more like a file path.

getLibraryEntry(type,name,meta,body) needs a bit more work as we need to build the directory structure as well as being able to return the actual file content.

getLibraryEntry: function(type,name) {
  if (name == "") {
    name = "/"
  } else if (name.substr(0,1) != "/") {
    name = "/" + name
  }

  return new Promise(function(resolve,reject) {
    Library.findOne({appname: appname, type: type, name: name}, function(err, file){
      if (err) {
        reject(err);
      } else if (file) {
        resolve(file.body);
      } else {
        var reg = new RegExp('^' + name , "");
        Library.find({appname: appname, type: type, name: reg }, function(err, fileList){
          if (err) {
            reject(err)
          } else {
            var dirs = [];
            var files = [];
            for (var i=0; i<fileList.length; i++) {
              var n = fileList[i].name;
              n = n.replace(name, "");
              if (n.indexOf('/') == -1) {
                var f = fileList[i].meta;
                f.fn = n;
                files.push(f);
              } else {
                n = n.substr(0,n.indexOf('/'))
                dirs.push(n);
              }
            }
            dirs = dirs.concat(files);
            resolve(dirs);
          }
        })
          
      }
    })
  });
},
saveLibraryEntry: function(type,name,meta,body) {
  return new Promise(function(resolve,reject) {
    var p = name.split("/");    // strip multiple slash
    p = p.filter(Boolean);
    name = p.slice(0, p.length).join("/")
    if (name != "" &amp;&amp; name.substr(0, 1) != "/") {
      name = "/" + name;
    }
    Library.findOneAndUpdate({appname: appname, name: name}, 
      {name:name, meta:meta, body:body, type: type},
      {upsert: true, useFindAndModify: false},
      function(err, library){
        if (err) {
          reject(err);
        } else {
          resolve();
        }
      });
  });
}

Using the plugin

To use the plugin you need to include it in the settings.js file. This is normally found in the userDir (the location of this file is logged when Node-RED starts up).

...
storageModule: require('node-red-contrib-storage-mongodb'),
mongodbSettings: {
    mongoURI: "mongodb://localhost/nodered",
    appname: "r1"
},
...

The mongodbSettings object contains the URI for the database and the appname is a unique identifier for this Node-RED instance allowing the same database to be used for multiple instances of Node-RED.

Source code

You can find the code for this module here and it’s hosted on npmjs here