TypeError: Cannot read property 'service' of undefined

[wuyuanyi135]

Hello,
I have made it to create user, but when logging in, I got no luck. Code at gist.

My request was

POST http://localhost:3000/auth/local
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

username=admin%40feathersjs.com&password=admin

It threw the exceptions:

TypeError: Cannot read property 'service' of undefined
    at Object.checkCredentials (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/feathers-authentication/lib/services/local/index.js:84:15)
    at Strategy.authenticate (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/passport-local/lib/strategy.js:90:12)
    at attempt (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/passport/lib/middleware/authenticate.js:348:16)
    at authenticate (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/passport/lib/middleware/authenticate.js:349:7)
    at /home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/feathers-authentication/lib/services/local/index.js:141:9
    at new Promise (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/core-js/modules/es6.promise.js:197:7)
    at Object.create (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/feathers-authentication/lib/services/local/index.js:120:14)
    at Object.wrapper (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/feathers/lib/mixins/promise.js:6:28)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/uberproto/lib/proto.js:30:17)
    at Object.wrapped (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/rubberduck/lib/rubberduck.js:63:19)
    at /home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/feathers-hooks/lib/before.js:49:20
    at new Promise (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/core-js/modules/es6.promise.js:197:7)
    at /home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/feathers-hooks/lib/before.js:36:18
    at run (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/core-js/modules/es6.promise.js:104:47)
    at /home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/core-js/modules/es6.promise.js:115:28
    at flush (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/core-js/modules/$.microtask.js:19:5)

But once I made some mistake, like Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urle, the rejecting json message was returned

{
"name": "NotAuthenticated"
"message": "Invalid login."
"code": 401
"className": "not-authenticated"
"errors": {}
}

Could anyone reproduce this?

[marshallswain]

You've mounted your user service at /, but you haven't let the auth plugin know about it.

app.use('/', service({Model: userModel}));

[wuyuanyi135]

Should I set userEndpoint: '/' in configuration?
I tried but I still got the same error messages

Thank you

[marshallswain]

Yeah, the userEndpoint will need to match, but looking at that stack trace, that wasn't the problem that caused this. (but it would have been the next one to come up:)

That top line in the stack trace

at Object.checkCredentials (/home/wuyuanyi/riddle-web/node_modules/feathers-authentication/lib/services/local/index.js:84:15)

Is this:

this.app.service(this.options.userEndpoint).find(params).then(function (users) {

So for some reason this.app isn't set correctly in that service.

[marshallswain]

I'd recommend trying to use the default userEndpoint, or setting it to something other than the root /.

[ekryski]

Hmm. I'll look at that issue but ya you shouldn't be using the root '/' for a service. Services are meant to be descriptive anyway.

[wuyuanyi135]

Thanks. I tried to use the default /user, still got the same problem.
I use feathers.use('api/user', [this module]) to route it so I use the root here. But it seems not the problem

[ekryski]

if you are using /api/user for your user endpoint the config value you pass for userEndpoint needs to match. So it would also need to be /api/user.

[ekryski]

I'll try running your gist. See if there is something else going on.

[wuyuanyi135]

@ekryski Thanks a lot 👍
Yeah I tried not to use feathers.use to route (directly use app.listen) then it works. I assumed that the userEndpoint is relative to this app. I am trying if changing the endpoint will work

I think that gist should work after modifying the userEndpoint.

[ekryski]

no problem. I think that may be your issue. Report back. We recently added some docs on routing. http://docs.feathersjs.com/middleware/routing.html

[wuyuanyi135]

if I will post login request to http://localhost:8080/riddle/api/user/auth/local
my user end point is http://localhost:8080/riddle/api/user/

index.js : app.use('/riddle/api',api); -> api: app.use('/user',user);
the user is the app in the gist, without listen(3000) but module.exports

What should the userEndPoint be?

[ekryski]

@wuyuanyi135 ah ok you are mounting a sub-app. I haven't tried that with auth yet. I think userEndpoint should just be /user then.

[ekryski]

Another thing I noticed in your gist is that all the hooks now take an options object. So you would change this:

userService.before(
    {
        create: [authHooks.hashPassword('password')]
    }
)

to this:

userService.before(
    {
        create: [authHooks.hashPassword({ passwordField: 'password'})]
    }
)

or you could just pass nothing since password is the default expected field.

[ekryski]

@wuyuanyi135 I just pushed a working sub-app example. Hopefully that helps.

[ekryski]

I think the reason this.app was undefined is because the sub app wasn't getting mounted properly. I'm going to close this now @wuyuanyi135 but if you aren't able to get the your stuff working after looking at the example we can create a new issue.

[wuyuanyi135]

@ekryski Thanks for your example. I have figured out the reason of this issue. It was improper configuration of the sub-apps. I left out these lines in my api sub-app.

var app = feathers()
.configure(socketio())
.configure(rest())
.use(bodyParser.json())
.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({extended: true}));

Even though there is no explicit use of feathers services, the intermediate router app:

var feathers = require('feathers');
var app = feathers();

var user = require('./user');
app.use('/user',user);

won't work.

Basically, all the sub-apps have to be configured like this to relay the request to deeper level.
Could catch and throw some descriptive message for possible missing configuration steps

[ekryski]

@wuyuanyi135 ya you are right. We should probably try and toss up some better error messaging or warnings. Thanks for that feedback!

The issue is actually related this one: feathersjs/feathers#216. When we close that you shouldn't ever run into this problem.

[thebarndog]

I've been having this issue for a few weeks too and it's super frustrating. My setup is relatively simple too:

const app = feathers();

app
  .configure(rest())
  .configure(hooks())
  .use(bodyParser.json())
  .use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }))
  .configure(authentication({
    token: {
      secret: config.JWT_SECRET
    },
    local: {
      usernameField: 'email'
    },
    facebook: {
      clientID: config.FACEBOOK_APP_ID,
      clientSecret: config.FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET,
      strategy: FacebookStrategy,
      tokenStrategy: FacebookTokenStrategy,
      permissions: {
        scope: ['email', 'public_profile']
      }
    }
  }))
  .use('/users', UserService)
  .use('/posts', PostService)
  .use('/groups', GroupService);

What's weird is that if I make a call to /api/auth/local (my sub-app is mounted at /api) using x-www-form-urlencoded, I get the TypeError: Cannot read property 'service' of undefined error but if I change that to form-data (using Postman), then the error changes to NotAuthenticated: Invalid login..

I did some more digging and in both cases, on the local setup, setup never gets called so that this.app is never set, which is why the call fails.

[wuyuanyi135]

@startupthekid how did you configure the parent app?

[thebarndog]

Very simply:

app
    .use('/api', apiRoutes)
    .use(feathers.static(__dirname));

I believe I just found the error inside the local service but I'll need a few minutes to verify.

[thebarndog]

Ok yeah I fixed it. @ekryski in the default export of the local service (and maybe others, I'm not sure):

export default function(options){
  options = Object.assign({}, defaults, options);
  debug('configuring local authentication service with options', options);

  return function() {
    const app = this;

    // Initialize our service with any options it requires
    app.use(options.localEndpoint, exposeConnectMiddleware, new Service(options), successfulLogin(options));

    // Get our initialize service to that we can bind hooks
    const localService = app.service(options.localEndpoint);

    // Register our local auth strategy and get it to use the passport callback function
    passport.use(new Strategy(options, localService.checkCredentials.bind(localService)));
  };
}

you have to add localService.setup(app). I remember reading somewhere, one of the others feathers repos, that any service created from an ES6 class (using new Service), has to have app.setup called manually. When I added that line into the default export of the local service, I was able to login.

It had nothing to do with it being a sub-app as far as I can tell, everything to do with the service being an es6 based class.

[daffl]

@startupthekid if you are using sub-apps, are you calling subapp.setup(server) as described in the documentation for sub-apps?

[daffl]

ES6 classes work the same way as normal services so that should not be an issue. But service.setup is called by app.setup which in your case probably never got called.

[thebarndog]

Ah I see, the call to app.setup wasn't in the example sub app that @ekryski posted, that's where my confusion was coming from.

[daffl]

It does call setup automatically if you use Socket.io but not without. There is no real reason for this except that I was being stupid ;)

feathersjs/feathers#232 and feathersjs/feathers#216 are probably related to this.

[ekryski]

ok then we should probably call setup when rest is configured as well. I've created an issue for this: feathersjs/feathers#259

[thosakwe]

Believe it or not, I'm having this problem too. And I don't have my API mounted as a subapp. I have no idea how to fix this, haha.

[ekryski]

@thosakwe would you be able to post a link to your project somewhere? I'm wondering if it is related to feathersjs/feathers#259. Are you creating your own service? Are you missing app.listen()?

[thosakwe]

@ekryski I believe it is related to #259.

Here's the app.js:
https://gist.github.com/thosakwe/280e808bcc2175b273f1

I'm at a loss, though. I tried using app.listen in my bin/www (this was originally an Express app) file, but now the error is "data and hash arguments required." So something I did breaks bcrypt somewhere.

[ekryski]

@thosakwe I need more than that to go on. The initial app setup looks just fine but I need to see how you set up your user service. If you don't have a user service set up, auth will not work. Additionally you need to make sure you are populating the user. Take a look at https://github.com/feathersjs/feathers-chat to see how those hooks are set up on the user service.

[daffl]

@thosakwe Would you mind opening a new issue with the code for your app? That way it'll be much easier for us to keep track of instead of looking through the comments of a closed issue :) Thank you!

[thosakwe]

Okay, cool. New issue: #108