Unlock the Power of Prisma: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building an Authenticated Server-Side Application
What is Prisma?
Prisma is an open-source ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool that allows developers to easily manage and interact with their database. With Prisma, you can define your database models and relations using the Prisma schema language, and then use Prisma Client to interact with your database.
Building an Authentication Scheme with Prisma in Express
In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to build an authenticated server-side application using Prisma for database schema and migration, and Express for the backend framework. We’ll also cover how to use third-party packages like JWT for token-based authentication.
Prerequisites
To follow this tutorial, you should have a working knowledge of Node.js, Express, npm, and Docker, as well as their latest versions installed on your computer.
Setting Up Express
To set up Express, we’ll first initialize our application using npm and then install Express using npm. We’ll also set up our PostgreSQL database using Docker.
Installing and Configuring Prisma
Once our Express application is set up, we can install Prisma using npm. We’ll create a new Prisma folder that contains the schema.prisma file and a.env file. We’ll then add a link to our database in the.env file.
Creating a Prisma Schema
We’ll create a Prisma schema that contains the user parameters that will be migrated to the database. We’ll then run our migration, which will create the table user in the database and add the columns for it.
Using Prisma Client
Prisma Client is an auto-generated and type-safe query builder that allows us to programmatically read and write data in a database from a Node.js or TypeScript application. We’ll install Prisma Client in our project and use it to interact with our database.
Index Requirements
We’ll create a couple of files and folders to house our controllers, services, and routes. We’ll also add our services, which interact with the database or Prisma.
Creating an Authorization Service
We’ll create a service file to communicate between our database and controller. We’ll create three functions: register, login, and all, which will register a new user to the database, get the user’s information, and log the user in.
Creating an Authorization Controller
We’ll create a controller to get our request body from our routes. We’ll add our register, login, and all functions to communicate with our respective services.
Creating an Authorization Guard
We’ll add our guard, which will protect some routes like all from users who are not logged in. This guard will verify our issued JWTs and, if valid, will allow users to access those routes.
Creating an Authorization Route
We’ll add our routes to our routes/auth.js file and add our auth guard to the all route to restrict the route from users without JWTs.
Testing
We’ll test our application using Postman to see if it’s working properly. We’ll test the register, login, and all routes to ensure that our authentication scheme is working correctly.
Wrapping Up
In this tutorial, we’ve gone through the process of building an authenticated server-side application using Prisma for database schema and migration. We’ve used the migrated data to register and log in a user, and create protected routes that accept valid tokens. For a more detailed codebase, you can clone the repository and configure it.