TokenAuthenticationDemo

Token Authentication

This sample project demostrates how to handle Token Based Authentication with ReactiveAPI.

What you will find

• Demo401 is a simple iOS app which interacts with the demo server
• server contains a node.js example server with the endpoints needed by the demo app
• server-requests as a series of shell scripts to interact with the server from CLI

How to make it work

• Be sure to have node.js installed on your mac. If not, get from here: https://nodejs.org/en/download/
• open a terminal, go to the server directory and execute: npm i && npm start. Don't close the terminal, you need to keep it open to make the server run and see its logs
  • next times, to start the server it's sufficient to execute npm start
  • to stop the server, press Control + C
• open another terminal, go to Demo401 directory and execute carthage update --platform iOS
• after it finishes, open the Demo401 project from Xcode
• Command + R and have fun!

How it works

ReactiveAPI borrows the concepts of Interceptor and Authenticator from OkHttp which makes working with token based authentication mechanism a breeze.

Interceptor

It can enrich requests to the server, by adding headers and parameters. When added to a ReactiveAPI instance, it is automatically called on each request. In this example it will be used to automatically add the saved token to each authenticated request.

Authenticator

It is called everytime there's an HTTP error. It gives you the possibility to try to recover errors. In this example it will be used to try to recover HTTP 401 Unauthorized errors by making a token renew request. If that succeeds, the original API call which failed will be automatically retried by ReactiveAPI.

For example, consider this flow:

• perform /login and save a token which expires in 5 minutes
• perform /some-authenticated-api after the token is expired. This will happen
  • /some-authenticated-api will return a 401
  • Authenticator will be called, which in turn will make a request to /refresh-token
  • If that succeeds, the original call to /some-authenticated-api will be automatically retried, otherwise you will get a permanent 401 Unauthorized HTTP error

We consider working software much better than comprehensive documentation, so get your hands dirty, clone the project and try it yourself! Most of all, have fun!