Rest-API site profile

[thomasaull]

I recently started to build Vue SPAs with ProcessWire as the backend, connected with a REST API. Thanks to code and the help of @LostKobrakai (How to use FastRoute with ProcessWire) and @clsource (REST-Helper) I got it up and running pretty quickly and now have put all of it in a site profile for others to use. It includes the REST API with routing for different endpoints, JWT Auth and a simple Vue SPA which shows the process of logging in a user (nevertheless, you don't have to use the Vue part, the API will work on it's own).

Check it out here: https://github.com/thomasaull/RestApiProfile

I'm pretty sure, it's not the perfect or most sophisticsted solution, but it gets the job done for me…

Feedback or Improvements are very welcome

Update: This site profile is a module now: https://github.com/thomasaull/RestApi

[clsource]

Seems great. Awesome Job!.

Thanks for sharing.

I think the JWT Auth may become a module on it´s own.

For folks who don´t know about JWT. It´s a standard for Authentication Using Json.

https://jwt.io/

[SamC]

4 hours ago, thomasaull said:

I recently started to build Vue SPAs with ProcessWire as the backend, connected with a REST API.

Sounds awesome, never done anything like this before, can we see an example application?

[thomasaull]

3 hours ago, SamC said:

Sounds awesome, never done anything like this before, can we see an example application?

Unfortunately, one is not public – the other one not finished (not public either, but I might put in in my portfolio with a screencast or anything)

[thomasaull]

5 hours ago, clsource said:

I think the JWT Auth may become a module on it´s own.

Are you working on it? I'm not sure if you need a module for that, the only thing which makes sense being managed by the backend is the JWT Secret maybe… But by all means it might make things easy for people who are not familiar with JWT!

[SamC]

13 minutes ago, thomasaull said:

Unfortunately, one is not public – the other one not finished (not public either, but I might put in in my portfolio with a screencast or anything)

Yeah that'd be good, thanks.

[blynx]

Nice! 

But I wonder if the JWT are really necessary here—or why the implementation?
Doesn't the server session / processwire handle that already?

[clsource]

On 4/12/2017 at 6:19 PM, thomasaull said:

Are you working on it? I'm not sure if you need a module for that, the only thing which makes sense being managed by the backend is the JWT Secret maybe… But by all means it might make things easy for people who are not familiar with JWT!

Not really at the moment. Just an idea

4 hours ago, blynx said:

Nice! 

But I wonder if the JWT are really necessary here—or why the implementation?
Doesn't the server session / processwire handle that already?

JWT is just a communication system.
If you look at the profile is the Processwire auth system that is used at the end.

Instead of using oAuth or Basic Authentication
JWT can be used for getting user roles and data without requiring to log in the user on every request,
saving server resources

 

[thomasaull]

15 hours ago, blynx said:

Nice! 

But I wonder if the JWT are really necessary here—or why the implementation?
Doesn't the server session / processwire handle that already?

It's not necessary, just one way of authentication. Basic Auth is perfectly fine aswell

[felix]

On a sidenote jwt is perfect when things need to "scale" (i.e. in a microservice architecture). Just share the secret across multiple instances and you don't have to care about syncing sessions and related data. The backend thus can be "stateless" (regarding logins) and just used to deliver data.

 

[psy]

@thomasaull Thanks for the profile. Can see you've put a lot of time and effort into it.

Have been reading up on PWA's and while Vue.js seems to be the flavour of the month, I really don't like its '/#/' in the URL. Seems Stencil.js is a very similar option and gets around the URL issue. I'm new at this and decided to try your Vue.js option first.

Got through most of it thanks to your docs and then got stumped big time at the login process.

All good to here using postman:

From then on, I got completely lost:

Did all that then used postman to try to get the JWT-token and log in. Nope... every response was "user is not logged in"

After many & varied attempts, I finally realised that the first conditional in /site/templates/api/Auth.php says if the user isn't log in, throw a WireException... OK but I'm not logged in. I'm trying to log in...

Commented out the WireException then my postman GET request gave me my JWT token.

Tried to login from my site but still no access???

 

Doesn't seem to matter whether I have $authActive set to true or false.

What am I doing wrong?

At what point, if ever, does $authActive get set back to true?

Any and all help, especially if they involve more detailed help docs (examples are great!!!!), much appreciated.

Thanks

psy

 

 

[psy]

Got a bit further... this time the error reporting in Router.php pointed to Tracy Debugger which is not included in the profile:

  public static function handle($class, $method, $vars)
  {
//      $authActive = true;
      $authActive = false;
//     if(!$authActive) \TD::fireLog('WARNING: Auth disabled!');

Another thing I did not know how to fix was that the Vue build files only worked when uploaded to the same domain as PW. When I uploaded the final build static folder and index.html to another domain, it failed with:

 

Does this mean I can only have one Vue SPA per PW instance? Would be good to have the ability for one PW instance to serve multiple Vue sites.

What's your recommendation for configuring, eg install PW in a subfolder and have the Vue build files in the root?

TIA

psy

 

[psy]

Still moving along slowly

Auth.php line 37 changed:

  public static function login($data) {
//      ApiHelper::checkRequiredParameters($data, ['username', 'password']);
      ApiHelper::checkAndSanitizeRequiredParameters($data, ['username', 'password']);

Next... in ApiHelper.php - again Tracy Debugger not installed/included in default profile:

      // Sanitize Data
      if (!$sanitizer) {
//        \TD::fireLog('WARNING: No Sanitizer specified for: ' . $name . ' Applying default sanitizer: text');
        $data->$name = wire('sanitizer')->text($data->$name);
      }

That then forced the next bit in ApiHelper.php to fail too, ie:

     $data->$name = wire('sanitizer')->$sanitizer($data->$name);

as $sanitizer is empty.

Maybe not me after all.

@thomasaull suspect you have the client file versions out of synch in the profile on github... what with TD calls and incorrect function names, etc. Please confirm.

[thomasaull]

Sorry for the hazzle @psy. I‘m on the road atm, how important is this? I can try to get you some assistance maybe later today

[psy]

Hi @thomasaull keen to get it resolved but not urgent in the next few hours. When you get it right is best  

Just grateful for the API and want to get it working. Have lots of applications for a fully functional PW REST API that handles logins and sanitizer.

Happy to help you quality control/troubleshoot. Maybe we can take this conversation offline until the profile is ready?

Keep me posted.

Thx

 

[thomasaull]

Ok so apparently my flight got wifi, so I'm able to answer now

Vue Router is also capable of suppressing the /#/ in URLs, you just need to add the HTML5 History Mode: https://router.vuejs.org/en/essentials/history-mode.html

Did you actually check and run the Vue Login example? Is everything working as supposed there?

The login does happen in the login function in Auth.php, the other function just makes sure the user is actually logged in and therefore allowed to query the API. 

$authActive never gets changed after the initial declaration, it's basically just a switch to make the API publicy available or not. 

To get rid of the errors by TracyDebugger you can just delete these lines, they are just in there for debugging. 

You can totally have multiple Vue SPAs querying the same API, although I have never tested this with this profile. There might be CORS related issues that needs to be solved first. For starters, I'd try to have it all under the same domain.

The checkAndSanitize works with. name|sanitizer pairs, check this line: https://github.com/thomasaull/RestApiProfile/blob/master/templates/api/Test.php#L17 (message is the parameter you're sending, text is the sanitizer which should be applied)

I think I forgot to change the function call in Auth.php, try: ApiHelper::checkAndSanitizeRequiredParameters($data, ['username|text', 'password|text']);

Try to change this line, remove all TracyDebugger statements and run the Vue example. I guess it should work then! I'm not with my computer until end of next week, so not really a big help I'm afraid ?

[psy]

Hi @thomasaull

In answer to your questions:

- Vue Router - thanks for the tip. Hadn't got that far yet

- Have run the installed-by-profile Vue Login example countless times - that's where I'm stuck. On the times I do get logged in, I'm only ever logged in as 'guest'

- OK I think about $authActive - but in the destructions you ask the dev to to change $authActive to false

- Yep, figured that but then in ApiHelper.php, $sanitizer is null so everything falls in a heap

- OK

- Ahhh yes, the line is just username, password - not username|text, password|text

Will try tomorrow. It's late here. Thanks for the help and safe travels

Cheers, psy

 

[psy]

Yay!!! Got it working successfully with a few tweaks to @thomasaull's templates.

In Auth.php:

  public static function login($data) {
//      ApiHelper::checkRequiredParameters($data, ['username', 'password']);

//    $data->username = wire('sanitizer')->selectorValue($data->username);
//    $data->password = wire('sanitizer')->string($data->password);

// All the below work as expected including logging an incorrect Sanitizer method
//    $data =   ApiHelper::checkAndSanitizeRequiredParameters($data, ['username', 'password']);
//    $data =   ApiHelper::checkAndSanitizeRequiredParameters($data, ['username|selectorValuexxx', 'password|string']);
      $data =   ApiHelper::checkAndSanitizeRequiredParameters($data, ['username|selectorValue', 'password|string']);

    $user = wire('users')->get($data->username);
...

The changes to ApiHelper::checkAndSanitizeRequiredParameters($data, $params) were a bit more intense:

  public static function checkAndSanitizeRequiredParameters($data, $params) {
    foreach ($params as $param) {
      // Split param: Format is name|sanitizer
      $name = explode('|', $param)[0];

        // Check if Param exists
        if (!isset($data->$name)) throw new \Exception('Required parameter "' . $param .'" missing!', 400);

        $sanitizer = stripos($param,'|') !== false ? explode('|', $param)[1] : 'text';

        // Check the sanitizer type is valid (Array copied from Sanitizer method testAll)
        $sanitizers = array(
            'alpha',
            'alphanumeric',
            'array',
            'bool',
            'date',
            'digits',
            'email',
            'emailHeader',
            'entities',
            'entities1',
            'entitiesMarkdown',
            'fieldName',
            'filename',
            'float',
            'int',
            'intArray',
            'intSigned',
            'intUnsigned',
            'markupToLine',
            'markupToText',
            'minArray',
            'name',
            'names',
            'pageName',
            'pageNameTranslate',
            'pageNameUTF8',
            'pagePathName',
            'pagePathNameUTF8',
            'path',
            'purify',
            'removeNewlines',
            'selectorField',
            'selectorValue',
            'string',
            'templateName',
            'text',
            'textarea',
            'unentities',
            'url',
            'varName',
        );
        if (!in_array($sanitizer, $sanitizers))
            throw new WireException(_("Invalid sanitizer type: $sanitizer for param $name"));

      $data->$name = wire('sanitizer')->$sanitizer($data->$name);
    }
    return $data;
  }

 

[thomasaull]

@psy I (hopefully) resolved all issues with an update to the site profile. Can you give it a try and check if everything is working for you now? https://github.com/thomasaull/RestApiProfile/releases/tag/0.1.1

I didn't want to copy all the sanitizers in my site profile since it might break, when there will be more sanitizers added in the future. Instead I'm checking with method_exists if the specified sanitizer exists.

Thanks for all your input and work

[psy]

@thomasaull Works great!

You say tomato and I say tomato  

One thing about putting the classes in templates rather than a module is that they can be modified to suit. I tweaked the new ApiHelper to make it more ProcessWire-ish for my own benefit - still does the same thing as your version.

    public static function checkAndSanitizeRequiredParameters($data, $params) {
        $sanitizer = wire('sanitizer');
        foreach ($params as $param) {
            // Split param: Format is name|sanitizer method
            $name = explode('|', $param)[0];
            // Check if Param exists
            if (!isset($data->$name)) throw new WireException(_("Required parameter: '$param' missing!"), 400);
            // Sanitize Data
            $parms = explode('|', $param);
            $sanMethod = 'text';
            if (isset($parms[1]))  $sanMethod = $parms[1];
            if(!method_exists($sanitizer, $sanMethod)) throw new WireException(_("Sanitizer: '$sanMethod' is invalid for param '$name'"), 400);
            $data->$name = $sanitizer->$sanMethod($data->$name);
        }
        return $data;
    }

Thanks for the update.  

 

[benoitb]

Hi @thomasaull,
Thanks for this great site profile !

After building for production I'm having a 404 error when trying to reach a page from its url.
It works with the /login though but I guess this is because this page doesn't exist as a processwire page.

This problem is explained here https://router.vuejs.org/guide/essentials/history-mode.html#example-server-configurations
but I'm not sure how to implement the Apache solution to make it work with processwire. 
 

Any ideas ?

Thanks!

[thomasaull]

If it works for the login, it should work with every other route aswell. Did you create the route in /router/index.js? And are you trying to use HTML5 History Mode?

[benoitb]

Yes, i'm using history mode.
Also I'm using props.

{ 
  path: '/:section/',
  name: 'Section',
  component: Section,
  props: true
}

where :section is the name of the page.

It's working fine in dev environnement but not in production.

I think it's related to that issue :
https://router.vuejs.org/guide/essentials/history-mode.html

Quote

Here comes a problem, though: Since our app is a single page client side app, without a proper server configuration, the users will get a 404 error if they access http://oursite.com/user/id directly in their browser. Now that's ugly.

it's trying to reach the processwire page instead of redirecting to my app template (home.php)

[benoitb]

Ok, I figured out 

I just needed to use the home.php template for every other templates (in templates/template/files/ > Alternate template settings)

 

Thank you for your reply !

[thomasaull]

Glad you figured it out! I think I ran into the same issue on another project earlier and I solived it like you by using "Alternate Template Filename". Since the frontend of a Vue App would be completely decoupled from ProcessWire anyway, another possible solution would be to set every page to "hidden" except the home page (didn't try that though). Edit: An that probably wouldn't allow deep linking on initial page load

Edited June 8, 2018 by thomasaull