140 cognito

[chnnick]

ℹ️ Issue

Closes #140

📝 Description

Created an easily-importable NestJS guard that can be used by future projects to implement Cognito Authentication into their application. Amplify on the frontend authenticates users, providing registered users with a JWT access token that can be used to access authorized routes.

Briefly list the changes made to the code:

1. NestJS guard that checks and verifies the Bearer token in the authorization header via AWS Cognito to determine access onto specific routes, puts the verified token payload under a user field of the request that can be read by other methods.
2. CognitoService getUser() method that exposes the verified JWT payload attached to the request by the guard
3. Cognito module that imported into App Module for authentication across entire application
4. @public decorator that allows one to bypass authentication by putting metadata read by the guard
5. Interface for an expected JWT payload used by the guard and service
6. Cognito config that allows for a centralized place to extract env variables for Cognito
7. Tests for the cognito service and cognito guard
8. Implemented Amplify on the frontend to show an auth screen and configure auth for the application if frontend cognito env variables are set, if anyfrontend cognito env values are not set, there is no auth screen
9. Cognito .env variables in example.env that is used by both the backend (Cognito) and frontend (Amplify)
10. README.md in backend/aws/cognito for new devs/TLs that provides documentation for how the authentication flow works: Authentication in frontend -> Authorization in the backend, as well as how to expand in the future.

✔️ Verification

Backend TESTS:

Frontend TESTS:
No Auth:

With Auth:

🏕️ (Optional) Future Work / Notes

• No styling on auth page, can import the @aws-amplify/ui-react/styles.css library on main.tsx to use their premade styling?

NEW: I think that a workshop on Authentication / Authorization would be helpful for future devs, would 100% be up to helping with that! I spent wayyy too much time figuring out the difference between the two and their uses in larger apps like which scaffolding will fork off of.

[dburkhart07]

Amazing! Very educational for me to read through as well!

[chnnick]

Fell down an authentication/authorization rabbit hole atm will update with new changes soon for a better approach for an authentication-only module that still allows authorization (RBAC) later down the line