Passport Authentication

Passport is authentication middleware for Node-dot-js created by Jared Hanson in 2011, providing a comprehensive suite of over five hundred authentication strategies for username and password, OAuth, OpenID, SAML, JSON Web Tokens, and social login through Google, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, Apple, Microsoft, and dozens of other providers, designed with a minimalist core that delegates authentication to strategy plugins, enabling developers to add authentication to Express applications with minimal code, adopted by hundreds of thousands of Node applications and recommended by the Express documentation as the go-to authentication solution. The authentication flow uses a standard three-step process consisting of strategy configuration, route protection, and session management, with the strategy receiving credentials or tokens, verifying them against the identity provider, and returning a user object or failure, while the session serialization and deserialization handles user persistence across requests through the Express session store. The OAuth strategies handle the complete OAuth flow including redirecting to the provider, exchanging authorization codes for access tokens, fetching user profiles, and handling refresh tokens, with strategies for OAuth 1.0a and OAuth 2.0, and automatic token refresh for expired access tokens. The JSON Web Token strategy validates tokens locally without a server round-trip, with configurable token extraction from headers, query parameters, or cookies. The local strategy for username and password. The SAML strategy for enterprise single sign-on. The session management. The error handling. The API authentication. The multi-provider support. Designed by Jared Hanson. Designed for Node developers.