How to use jquery/ajax data for passportjs

Question

If I send a login request using the form fields action=\"/login\", method=\"post\", it works just fine. Similar to the code available here or here.

But

Answer 1

I tried your code and Passport-wise it works. I did "Local Signup", "Logout", then "Local Login" and was successfully authenticated but nothing indicated that in the UI.

This is related to that 302 you were talking about - the server replied 302 because you have defined successRedirect : '/profile', and then jQuery followed the redirect and received HTML which it cannot parse because it expects JSON. And since you don't have .fail() callback defined in your $.ajax call you don't see it.

The session is fine though which can be seen by going manually to /profile.

When you login using a regular HTML form the browser will send a single HTTP request and act according to the response (e.g render a HTML page, or perform a redirect if it was 302). The same happens but in different context when you call $.ajax - the AJAX call follows the redirect because it made the request, but the browser does not.

You should use separate routes for AJAX and HTML logins, or use a custom callback and determine what to return based on req.accepts().

The separate routes could be eg.

// AJAX logins to this URL, redirect on client side using
// window.location.href if login succeeds
app.post('/login/ajax', passport.authenticate('local-login'));

// HTTP login form send to this URL
app.post('/login', passport.authenticate('local-login', {
  successRedirect : '/profile',
  failureRedirect : '/login',
  failureFlash : true
}));

Custom callback could be something like this (not tested):

app.post('/login', function(req, res, next) {
  passport.authenticate('local-login', function(err, user, info) {
    switch (req.accepts('html', 'json')) {
      case 'html':
        if (err) { return next(err); }
        if (!user) { return res.redirect('/login'); }
        req.logIn(user, function(err) {
          if (err) { return next(err); }
          return res.redirect('/profile');
        });
        break;
      case 'json':
        if (err)  { return next(err); }
        if (!user) { return res.status(401).send({"ok": false}); }
        req.logIn(user, function(err) {
          if (err) { return res.status(401).send({"ok": false}); }
          return res.send({"ok": true});
        });
        break;
      default:
        res.status(406).send();
    }
  })(req, res, next);    
});