Sloggin' Through The Login

Environment Files

Got my .env files setup for our system. First added the node package yarn add --dev dotenv, added .env in the .gitignore file, and required the package in the app.js file: require('dotenv').config(). Then created a .env file with a list of variables we don’t want to store on GitHub:

PGHOST=myHostName
PGPORT=0000
PGUSER=myUserName
PGPASSWORD=myPassWord
DB_NAME=myDatabaseName

To use the variables I just enter process.env.DB_NAME where I would want the database name to show up, and so on. For collaboration with the group, I also created a .env.default file which is not included in .gitignore and shared with my team. They just see the variable names without the secret information, and can use this to create their own .env file with the same details I have.

This was especially helpful because one of my teammates’ Postgres database is set up on a different port so we were always switching back and forth as we worked. Now we won’t need to do that, and can just keep different port numbers in our own .env files.

Validating Form Inputs

I’m using the node package express-validator to make sure the form data is clean: ‘email’ is actually an email address, the two password fields match each other, password is a certain number of characters, that sort of thing. It was fairly straightforward to implement, but I expect there are a lot more validators I’m not aware of so plan to dive deeper into this at some point.

And while I did figure out how to reject invalid entries from the database, I still have to figure out how to get the errors to generate for the user (not just in the console.)

Hashing Passwords

I also implemented the node package bcrypt to secure user passwords as they are saved in the database. Again, I was surprised at how straightforward this implementation was: just needed to wrap my Sequelize ‘create user’ command within the bcrypt function:

bcrypt.hash(password, saltRounds, function(err, hash) {
    var newUser = {first: first, last: last, email: email, password: hash};
    User.create(newUser);
  });

Other Stuff

Added another Terminal shortcut to be able to open files or folders in Sublime: alias subl="open -a /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app". Always love a good shortcut.

Up Next

More sloggin’.