Book Image

Advanced Express Web Application Development

By : Andrew Keig
Book Image

Advanced Express Web Application Development

By: Andrew Keig

Overview of this book

Building an Express application that is reliable, robust, maintainable, testable, and can scale beyond a single server requires a bit of extra thought and effort. Express applications that need to survive in a production environment will need to reach out to the Node ecosystem and beyond, for support.You will start by laying the foundations of your software development journey, as you drive-out features under test. You will move on quickly to expand on your existing knowledge, learning how to create a web API and a consuming client. You will then introduce a real-time element in your application.Following on from this, you will begin a process of incrementally improving your application as you tackle security, introduce SSL support, and how to handle security vulnerabilities. Next, the book will take you through the process of scaling and then decoupling your application. Finally, you will take a look at various ways you can improve your application's performance and reliability.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Advanced Express Web Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Cross-site request forgery


Cross-site request forgery (CRSF) is an attack that tricks the victim into executing malicious actions on a web application in which they are authenticated. Connect/Express comes packaged with a Cross-site request forgery protection middleware. This middleware allows us to ensure that a request to a mutate state is from a valid source. The CRSF middleware creates a token that is stored in the requests session as _csrf. A request to our Express server will then need to pass the token in the header field X-CSRF-Token.

Let's create a security ./lib/security/index.js module that adds the csrf middleware to our application. We define a function, Security, that takes an Express app as an argument and removes the middleware when in TEST or COVERAGE mode.

var express = require('express');

function Security(app) {
  if (process.env['NODE_ENV'] === "TEST"  ||process.env['NODE_ENV'] === "COVERAGE") return;

  app.use(express.csrf());
};

module.exports = Security;

Let's make...