Authentication

Authentication is the process of proving that people are who they say they are.

Manifest uses JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to do that. When you log in, you basically create a new token that you use in your next requests to prove your identity. This allows us to use Policies to grant or deny the access to some resources based on the user characteristics.

Admins

Admins are a built-in entity that are the only ones with access to the admin panel (located at http://localhost:1111 by default). The admins are usually the people who manage the application on a day-to-day basis. Only admins can see and manage other admins.

Even though they are the most powerful users of your application, you can still create some policies that will restrict the access even for them.

The seed command will create an admin with the email admin@manifest.build and the password admin. You can create more admins from the admin panel.

tip

In Manifest, the admin panel is non-technical 😺.

It means that you can give credentials to the administrators of your app without worrying that they will end up breaking the system!

Authenticable entities

You can convert any entity into an authenticatable entity, allowing users to log in with it.

# manifest/backend.yml
entities:
  🤒 Patient:
    authenticable: true # Makes entity authenticable.
    properties:
      - name

Authenticable entities have 2 extra properties that are used as credentials to log in: email and password. You do not need to specify them.

The passwords are automatically hashed using SHA-3 algorithm.

Syntax

Login

Log in your credentials as an admin or an authenticable entity.

JS SDK

// Login as Admin.
await manifest.login('admins', 'admin@manifest.build', 'password')

// Login as User entity.
await manifest.login('users', 'user@example.com', 'password')

// Then all following requests will have the authorization token in their header until logout.
const example = await manifest.from('restricted-resource').find()

REST API

// Login as Admin.
POST /api/auth/admins/login
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "email": "admin@manifest.build",
    "password": "password"
}

// Response.
{
    "token": "12345"
}

Then you can add your token to your requests Authorization header using the Bearer prefix:

GET /api/dynamic/cats
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: Bearer your-token-here

Sign up

Any authenticable entity allows new users to sign up if the policies permit it.

JS SDK

// Sign up as a new user.
await manifest.signup('users', 'user@example.com', 'password')

// Then all following requests will have the authorization token in its header until logout.
const example = await manifest.from('restricted-resource').find()

REST API

// Sign up as a new user.
POST /api/auth/users/signup
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "email": "user@example.com",
    "password": "password"
}

// Response.
{
    "token": "12345"
}

Same as login, you can add your token to your requests Authorization header using the Bearer prefix:

GET /api/dynamic/cats
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: Bearer your-token-here

info

It is not possible to sign up as an admin. If you want to create more admins, do it from the admin panel.

Get current user

Get the current logged-in user.

JS SDK

// Get the current user (logged as Contributor entity).
const me = await manifest.from('contributors').me()

REST API

GET /api/auth/contributors/me
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: Bearer your-token-here

// Response.
{
  id: 1,
  email: 'contributor@test.com'
}

Logout

Logout removes the token from future request headers.

JS SDK

// All future calls will lose the "Authorization" header.
await manifest.logout()

REST API

Reset the Authorization header as you usually do, and you are good to go !