Blog: Updating to Ember Simple Auth 1.0

As 1.0.0 marks the first stable release of Ember Simple Auth, upcoming versions will adhere to the Semantic Versioning rule of not including breaking changes in patch level or minor releases. In fact, Ember Simple Auth will follow Ember’s example and only make additive, backwards compatible changes in all 1.x releases and only remove deprecated parts of the library in the next major release.

Uninstall previous versions

Ember Simple Auth 1.0.0 is only distributed as an Ember CLI Addon and drops the previous bower distribution as well as the individual ember-cli-simple-auth-* packages. The first step when upgrading to 1.0.0 is to uninstall these packages from the application. To do that simply remove the ember-simple-auth package from bower.json as well as all ember-cli-simple-auth-* packages from packages.json.

Install 1.0.0

Once the previous versions are uninstalled, install the 1.0.0 release:

ember install ember-simple-auth

Fix the imports

With 1.0.0 all modules that it defines now live in the ember-simple-auth namespace as opposed to the simple-auth namespace of previous versions. All the import statements that import code from Ember Simple Auth need to be updated accordingly, e.g.

import ApplicationRouteMixin from 'simple-auth/mixins/application-route-mixin';

becomes

import ApplicationRouteMixin from 'ember-simple-auth/mixins/application-route-mixin';

Also the modules for the OAuth 2.0 authenticator and authorizer have been renamed from just oauth2 to oauth2-password-grant and oauth2-bearer respectively so that 'simple-auth/authenticators/oauth2' is now 'ember-simple-auth/authenticators/oauth2-password-grant' and 'simple-auth/authorizers/oauth2' is now 'ember-simple-auth/authorizers/oauth2-bearer'.

Inject the session service

With Ember Simple Auth 1.0.0 the session is no longer automatically injected into all routes, controllers and components but instead is now available as an Ember.Service so in all routes, controllers and components that use the session (or back a template that uses it), that session service needs to be injected, e.g.:

import Ember from 'ember';

export default Ember.Controller.extend({
  session: Ember.inject.service()
});

Define Authenticators and Authorizers

Ember Simple Auth 1.0.0 does not automatically merge all the predefined authenticators and authorizers into the application anymore but instead requires authenticators and authorizers the application actually uses to be defined explicitly. So if you e.g. were previously using the OAuth 2.0 authenticator simply define an authenticator that extends the OAuth 2.0 authenticator in app/authenticators:

// app/authenticators/oauth2.js
import OAuth2PasswordGrant from 'ember-simple-auth/authenticators/oauth2-password-grant';

export default OAuth2PasswordGrant.extend({
  serverTokenRevocationEndpoint: '/revoke'
});

In addition to the renamed module, the signature of the OAuth 2.0 authenticator has changed as well so that it now expects dedicated arguments for the user’s identification and password instead of one object containing both values, so

const credentials = this.getProperties('identification', 'password');
this.get('session').authenticate('authenticator:oauth2', credentials);

becomes

const { identification, password } = this.getProperties('identification', 'password');
this.get('session').authenticate('authenticator:oauth2', identification, password);

Also authenticators and authorizers are not configured via config/environment.js anymore but instead the respective properties are simply overridden in the extended classes as for the serverTokenRevocationEndpoint property in the example above.

Setup authorization

Ember Simple Auth’s old auto-authorization mechanism was complex (especially when working with cross origin requests where configuring the crossOriginWhitelist was causing big problems for many people) and has been removed in 1.0.0. Instead authorization is now explicit. To authorize a block of code use the session service’s authorize method, e.g.:

this.get('session').authorize('authorizer:oauth2-bearer', (headerName, headerValue) => {
  xhr.setRequestHeader(headerName, headerValue);
});

If the application uses Ember Data, you can authorize all of the requests it sends to the API by using the new DataAdapterMixin, e.g.:

// app/adapters/application.js
import DS from 'ember-data';
import DataAdapterMixin from 'ember-simple-auth/mixins/data-adapter-mixin';

export default DS.JSONAPIAdapter.extend(DataAdapterMixin, {
  authorizer: 'authorizer:application'
});

Migrating custom sessions

While previous versions of Ember Simple Auth allowed to configure a custom session class in order to add properties and methods to the session, Ember Simple Auth 1.0.0 makes the session private and only exposes the session service. In order to migrate a custom session class to work with the service there are 2 options.

Extend the session service

You can simply extend the session service and add custom properties and methods in the subclass, e.g.:

// app/services/session.js
import Ember from 'ember';
import DS from 'ember-data';
import SessionService from 'ember-simple-auth/services/session';

export default SessionService.extend({
  store: Ember.inject.service(),

  account: Ember.computed('data.authenticated.account_id', function() {
    const accountId = this.get('data.authenticated.account_id');
    if (!Ember.isEmpty(accountId)) {
      return DS.PromiseObject.create({
        promise: this.get('store').find('account', accountId)
      });
    }
  })
});

Create dedicated services

You can also create dedicated services that use the session service internally, e.g.:

import Ember from 'ember';
import DS from 'ember-data';

export default Ember.Service.extend({
  session: Ember.inject.service('session'),
  store: Ember.inject.service(),

  account: Ember.computed('session.data.authenticated.account_id', function() {
    const accountId = this.get('session.data.authenticated.account_id');
    if (!Ember.isEmpty(accountId)) {
      return DS.PromiseObject.create({
        promise: this.get('store').find('account', accountId)
      });
    }
  })
});

In this case the session service remains unchanged and whenever you need the currently authenticated account you’d use the session-account service to get that.

Both solutions work fine but the latter results in cleaner code and better separation of concerns.

Session Stores

Previous versions of Ember Simple Auth allowed the session store to be configured in config/environment.js. Ember Simple Auth 1.0.0 removes that configuration setting and will always use the 'application' session store. If not overridden by the application that session store will be an instance of the new AdaptiveStore that internally uses the LocalStorageStore if localStorage storage is available and the CookieStore if it is not. To customize the application store, define it in app/session-stores/application.js, extend a predefined session store and customize properties (as done for authenticators and authorizers as described above) or implement a fully custom store, e.g.:

// app/session-store/application.js
import CookieStore from 'ember-simple-auth/session-stores/cookie';

export default CookieStore.extend({
  cookieName: 'my_custom_cookie_name'
});

Ember Simple Auth 1.0.0 will also automatically use the EphemeralStore when running tests so there is no need anymore to configure that for the test environment (in fact the configuration setting has been removed).

Update acceptance tests

While previous versions of Ember Simple Auth automatically injected the test helpers, version 1.0.0 requires them to be imported in the respective acceptance tests, e.g.:

import { invalidateSession, authenticateSession, currentSession } from '../helpers/ember-simple-auth';

Also they now take the application instance as a first argument so instead of

authenticateSession();

one would now write

authenticateSession(App);

Update the application route if necessary

The ApplicationRouteMixin in Ember Simple Auth 1.0.0 now only defines the two methods sessionAuthenticated and sessionInvalidated as opposed to the previous four actions. If the application overrides any of these actions it would now have to override these methods.

Wrapping up

I hope this gives a good overview of how upgrading an Ember application to Ember Simple Auth 1.0.0 works. There is lots of documentation available in the README and the API Docs. You might also want to check out the dummy application in the github repo and the intro video on the website.