Understanding passport serialize deserialize

For anyone using Koa and koa-passport:

Know that the key for the user set in the serializeUser method (often a unique id for that user) will be stored in:

this.session.passport.user

When you set in done(null, user) in deserializeUser where 'user' is some user object from your database:

this.req.user OR this.passport.user

for some reason this.user Koa context never gets set when you call done(null, user) in your deserializeUser method.

So you can write your own middleware after the call to app.use(passport.session()) to put it in this.user like so:

app.use(function * setUserInContext (next) {
  this.user = this.req.user
  yield next
})

If you're unclear on how serializeUser and deserializeUser work, just hit me up on twitter. @yvanscher

1. Where does user.id go after passport.serializeUser has been called?

The user id (you provide as the second argument of the done function) is saved in the session and is later used to retrieve the whole object via the deserializeUser function.

serializeUser determines which data of the user object should be stored in the session. The result of the serializeUser method is attached to the session as req.session.passport.user = {}. Here for instance, it would be (as we provide the user id as the key) req.session.passport.user = {id: 'xyz'}

2. We are calling passport.deserializeUser right after it where does it fit in the workflow?

The first argument of deserializeUser corresponds to the key of the user object that was given to the done function (see 1.). So your whole object is retrieved with help of that key. That key here is the user id (key can be any key of the user object i.e. name,email etc). In deserializeUser that key is matched with the in memory array / database or any data resource.

The fetched object is attached to the request object as req.user

Visual Flow

passport.serializeUser(function(user, done) {
    done(null, user.id);
});              │
                 │ 
                 │
                 └─────────────────┬──→ saved to session
                                   │    req.session.passport.user = {id: '..'}
                                   │
                                   ↓           
passport.deserializeUser(function(id, done) {
                   ┌───────────────┘
                   │
                   ↓ 
    User.findById(id, function(err, user) {
        done(err, user);
    });            └──────────────→ user object attaches to the request as req.user   
});