how to check if database needs auth or not

Question

I'm working on a project which allows user to login to a mongodb database. Basically I have

db.authenticate(username, password, function(err, isAuthPass) {...}

to check if the user pass the authentication. However, sometimes the server doesn't need authentication. If I provide username/password, it will fail. So I need to know how to check auth mode with mongo-native-client. Any idea?

Answer 1

Well I suppose you could just interrogate the database for the config information. This does come with the caveat that you should also be using the "test/fail" methods as discussed before as you would not be able to get this information from a server with authentication enabled that is not running on localhost:

var mongo = require('mongodb'),
    MongoClient = mongo.MongoClient;


MongoClient.connect('mongodb://localhost:30000/test',function(err,db) {

  var adminDb = db.admin();

  adminDb.command({ "getCmdLineOpts": 1 },function(err,result) {
    console.log( JSON.stringify( result, undefined, 4 ) );
  });

});

That shows the "parsed" options, and it does not matter whether they are actually sent from the command line or picked up from a config file as the output here suggests:

{
    "documents": [
        {
            "argv": [
                "mongod",
                "--config",
                "mongod.conf"
            ],
            "parsed": {
                "config": "mongod.conf",
                "net": {
                    "bindIp": "0.0.0.0",
                    "port": 30000
                },
                "security": {
                    "authorization": "enabled"
                },
                "storage": {
                    "dbPath": "data"
                },
                "systemLog": {
                    "destination": "file",
                    "logAppend": true,
                    "path": "log/mongod.log"
                }
            },
            "ok": 1
        }
    ],
    "index": 338,
    "messageLength": 338,
    "requestId": 25,
    "responseTo": 3,
    "responseFlag": 8,
    "cursorId": "0",
    "startingFrom": 0,
    "numberReturned": 1
}

So here the presence of "security.authorization.enabled": true tells you that further operations are going to require authorized credentials to be supplied.

Also see getCmdLineOpts and other diagnostic information commands that should be useful for your tool.