Ory Kratos NodeJS / ExpressJS User Interface Reference Implementation

This repository contains a reference implementation for Ory Kratos' in NodeJS / ExpressJS / Handlebars / NextJS. It implements all Ory Kratos flows (login, registration, account settings, account recovery, account verification).

If you only want to add authentication to your app, and not customize the login, registration, account recovery, ... screens, please check out the Ory Kratos Quickstart.

Configuration

This application can be configured using two environment variables:

• KRATOS_PUBLIC_URL (required): The URL where ORY Kratos's Public API is located at. If this app and ORY Kratos are running in the same private network, this should be the private network address (e.g. kratos-public.svc.cluster.local).
• TLS_CERT_PATH (optional): Path to certificate file. Should be set up together with TLS_KEY_PATH to enable HTTPS.
• TLS_KEY_PATH (optional): Path to key file Should be set up together with TLS_CERT_PATH to enable HTTPS.
• KRATOS_BROWSER_URL (optional) The browser accessible URL where ORY Kratos's public API is located, only needed if it differs from KRATOS_PUBLIC_URL

This is the easiest mode as it requires no additional set up. This app runs on port :4455 and ORY Kratos KRATOS_PUBLIC_URL URL.

This mode relies on the browser's ability to send cookies regardless of the port. Cookies set for 127.0.0.1:4433 will thus also be sent when requesting 127.0.0.1:4455. For environments where applications run on separate subdomains, check out Multi-Domain Cookies

To authenticate incoming requests, this app uses ORY Kratos' whoami API to check whether the session is valid or not.

Base Path

There are two ways of serving this application under a base path:

1. Let Express.js handle the routing by setting the BASE_PATH environment variable to the sub-path, e.g. /myapp.
2. Use a reverse proxy or API gateway to strip the path prefix.

The second approach is not always possible, especially when running the application on a serverless environment. In this case, the first approach is recommended.

Development

To run this app with dummy data and no real connection to ORY Kratos, use:

$ NODE_ENV=stub npm start

Test with ORY Kratos

The easiest way to test this app with a local installation of ORY Kratos is to have the ORY Kratos Quickstart running. This is what that would look like:

# start the quickstart using docker compose as explained in the tutorial: https://www.ory.sh/kratos/docs/quickstart/
export KRATOS_PUBLIC_URL=http://127.0.0.1:4433/
export PORT=4455

# In ORY Kratos run the quickstart:
#
#   make quickstart-dev
#
# Next you need to kill the docker container that runs this app in order to free the ports:
#
#   docker kill kratos_kratos-selfservice-ui-node_1

npm start

Update TypeScript SDK

If you've made changes to the ORY Kratos API you may want to manually generate the TypeScript SDK in order for URLs and payloads to work as expected. It is expected that you start this guide from this project's root, wherever you checked it out. You also need to have the openapi-generator installed.

# Set path to kratos:
export KRATOS_DIR=/path/to/kratos
make build-sdk

Building the Docker Image

# Set path to kratos:
export KRATOS_DIR=/path/to/kratos
make build-sdk-docker

Clean up

make clean-sdk