#everyauth

This was perhaps the most annoying problem while developing an App for Facebook. Still, the workaround is not that bad. The problem is I think that unless Facebook had an specific token to relate a request to a certain App (instead of using the predefined callback) it would be possible to have localhost:port-number as an app domain, but that wouldn't make any sense either because that's not really the domain your App is running at, am I right? So one solution is a really quick __workaround__ with your `hosts` file and to modify the callback address to match your localhost:port so that your OS will catch the domain within the `hosts` file, redirect it invisibly to 127.0.0.1 and use the port you specified to access the application server running on your localhost. Simple, and works. So let's dive right ###The Hosts file On UNIX or UNIX-like system you are most likely going to find this file at `/etc/hosts` and will also most likely need to `sudo` to modify it. On Windows I recall performing at simple search in my Windows installation directory and the file being hidden, but it shouldn't be a big deal to find it anyway.  __Side-note: I like to use Python/CoffeeScript as the syntax so the comments are properly highlighted, but as you can see this file usually doesn't have an extension.__

https://gist.github.com/4241326

###The App Normally this will vary from platform to platform, and from framework to framework as well, but also normally you would have a "callbackUrl" that would most likely look something like `/auth/facebook/callback`, and a host url that most likely will not be set because the framework has a default value that would point to localhost. If you were in a server that would make sense but since we are trying to lie to Facebook about the domain name of our app and where it points to, we will need to change that to `yourapp.domain[:port]` --where the port is completely optional.  Here is a little snippet to doing this in `node` with `everyauth` (assuming `env` holds your current environment configuration in a single string, like "development" or "production" or "testing"):

https://gist.github.com/4241431

Everyauth is a node module designed to manage logins on your site.  It covers most of the popular services (Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Github, etc...) as well as a custom signup. 

Here's an example of everyauth custom registration:

var everyauth = require('everyauth'),connect = require('connect'); everyauth.password.registerUser(function(newUserAttributes){ var promise = this.Promise(); User.create(newUserAttributes, function (err, user) { if (err) return promise.fulfill([err]); promise.fulfill(user); }); return promise; });

Here the code to save the model has been passed by anonymous function. We could just as easily take that function, throw it into a controller and call the action directly.

//in the controller function SaveUser(newUserAttributes){ var promise = this.Promise(); User.create(newUserAttributes, function (err, user) { if (err) return promise.fulfill([err]); promise.fulfill(user); }); return promise; } ... everyauth.password.registerUser(MyController.SaveUser);

This will work without issue, except for tests. I came up with a solution for the tests, but then I realized that binding the controller to everyauth's flow control is bad design. My solution was to create a wrapper.

//in the controller function SaveUser(newUserAttributes,callbacks){ User.create(newUserAttributes, function (err, user) { if (err) return callbacks.error([err]); callbacks.success(user); }); } ... everyauth.password.registerUser(function(data){ return wrapper.wrap(MyController.SaveUser,this,data)}); ... //the wrapper var wrapper = { wrap : function (fcn,context) { var promise = context.Promise(); var dataArray = arguments.slice(2,arguments.length); dataArray.push({ error: function(err){ promise.fail(err); }, success: function(data){ promise.fulfill(data); } }); fcn.apply(this,dataArray); return promise; } }; module.exports = wrapper;

Everyauth is a node module that provides "authentication and authorization (password, facebook, & more) for your node.js Connect and Express apps."

We wrote some code to manage logins using it, but ran into some difficulty when testing the controller.  Everyauth allows to specify, as parameters, the route, view, and even controller actions that it should use1.  Because of this, any calls to the controller action are coming in under the context of everyauth. 

Normally this wouldn't be an issue, except that everyauth uses promises.  The code that we had trouble testing used "this.Promise()" which in dev pointed to everyauth, but in test points to the test runner (which does not have a promise method). 

The solution was to provide a closure around the controller call.  Here's the pseudo code for vows.js tests:

var promiseLib = require("path/to/everyauth/lib/promise.js"); // ... // other test setup // ... vows.describe('Playing with a controller').addBatch({ topic: function() { var topic = this; var user= { data: "test" }; var registerClosure = function(){ this.Promise = function (values) { var prom = new promiseLib(this, values); prom.callback(function(values){ topic.callback('success',values); },this) .errback(function(err){ topic.callback('error',err); },this) .timeback(function(){ topic.callback('timeout'); },this); return prom; }; controller.actionToTest.call(this,user); }; registerClosure(); }, 'it should return true': function(type,value){ assert.strictEqual(type, "success"); assert.strictEqual(value.data, "test"); } });

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