Node passport-local strategy always fails

Question

I'm using the Node.js Passport module to build an authentication process, and I'm unable to figure out why the verification always fails, even when I return success every time from the verification callback. To keep the example simple, I'm just using the passport-local strategy with no persistent storage:

var passport = require('passport');
var LocalStrategy = require('passport-local').Strategy;
var express = require('express');
var server = express();

passport.serializeUser(function (user, done) {
  done(null, user);
});

passport.deserializeUser(function (id, done) {
  done(null, id);
});

passport.use(new LocalStrategy(
  function (username, password, done) {
    // Would perform lookup and verification here.
    // Instead return a valid user object every time.
    var user = { username: username };
    return done(null, user);
  }
));

server.post('/login', passport.authenticate('local', { failureRedirect: '/failure' }), function (req, res) {
  res.send('access granted');
});

var port = process.env.PORT || 3000;
server.listen(port,  function() {
  console.log('Listening on port ' + port);
});

Similar questions have been solved by adding placeholder user serialization/deserialization methods, but I've got those in place.

Here's a CURL call to hit the above with a username and password:

curl -X "POST" "http://127.0.0.1:3000/login" \
  --data-urlencode "username=alice" \
  --data-urlencode "password=supersecret"

When I perform that POST, the response contains the HTTP 302 failure redirect to /failure every time, even though I'm returning null (no error), and a dummy user object in the LocalStrategy callback. What am I overlooking?

Answer 1

I was overlooking two things:

• There was no call to the passport.initialize() middleware
• I wasn't parsing request bodies because Express doesn't include that out of the box

Now my require block at the top includes both of those missing items, and it returns 200 OK when POSTing to /login:

var passport = require('passport');
var LocalStrategy = require('passport-local').Strategy;
var express = require('express');
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
var server = express();
server.use(passport.initialize());
//server.use(passport.session()); -- For persistent login sessions
server.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }))