Making requests to external web services

As of version 2.5, ArangoDB provides a familiar API for making HTTP requests to external services. This allows you to integrate with third party APIs or to implement simple web hooks in your Foxx apps.

Problem

I have an existing Foxx app with authentication (such as the auth app from the recipe for Foxx authentication) and want to use an external web service to authenticate my users instead.

Solution

Let’s say your external authentication service lives at https://auth.example.com/login and expects a POST request containing a plain old URL-encoded web form with a username and password field. It responds with a 200 status code and the user data (with a property userId containing a unique ID for the user and a property profile containing additional information about the user) if the credentials are valid and returns a 401 status code otherwise.

Next let’s import the request module into your Foxx app. Open the file containing the controller and add request = require('org/arangodb/request') to the list of imports. You can then use the external service in your login route like this:

controller.post('/login', function (req, res) {
  var credentials = req.params('credentials');
  var response = request.post('https://auth.example.com/login', {
    form: {
      username: credentials.get('username'),
      password: credentials.get('password')
    }
  });

  if (response.status === 200) {
    var user = JSON.parse(response.body);
    req.session.set('uid', 'auth.example.com/' + user.userId);
    req.session.set('userData', user.profile);
    res.session.save();
    res.status(201);
    res.json({
      msg: 'Welcome ' + user.profile.fullName
    });
  } else if (response.status === 401) {
    throw new NotLoggedIn();
  } else {
    console.error('Remote authentication failed (%s) with error:', response.status, response.body);
    throw new Error('An unknown error occurred!');
  }
})
.bodyParam('credentials', {description: 'Username and Password', type: Credentials})
.errorResponse(NotLoggedIn, 401, 'Login failed');

Author: Alan Plum

Tags: #foxx