Passport.js multiple local strategies and req.user

Question

The client for my web-app wants to totally separate regular users and admins, hence I'm trying to implement two local strategies for passport.js:

passport.use('local', new LocalStrategy({
    usernameField: 'email'
}, function(email, password, done) {
    User.findOne({ email: email }, function(err, user) {
        if (err) return done(err);
        if (!user) return done(null, false, { message: 'Wrong email or password.' });
        if (!user.validPassword(password)) return done(null, false, { message: 'Wrong email or password.' });
        done(null, user);
    });
}));

passport.use('admin', new LocalStrategy({
    usernameField: 'email'
}, function(email, password, done) {
    Admin.findOne({ email: email }, function(err, admin) {
        if (err) return done(err);
        if (!admin) return done(null, false, { message: 'Wrong email or password.' });
        if (!admin.validPassword(password)) return done(null, false, { message: 'Wrong email or password.' });
        done(null, admin);
    });
}));

passport.serializeUser(function(user, done) {
    done(null, user.id);
});

passport.deserializeUser(function(id, done) {

    Admin.findById(id, function(err, admin) {
        if (err) return done(err);
        if (admin) return done(null, admin);
        User.findById(id, function(err, user) {
            done(err, user);
        });
    });
});

And then in my API admin router:

router.post('/', function(req, res, next) {
    if (typeof req.body.email === 'undefined') return res.json({ success: false, message: 'Email not supplied.' });
    if (!validator.isEmail(req.body.email)) return res.json({ success: false, message: 'Wrong email format.' });
    if (typeof req.body.password === 'undefined') return res.json({ success: false, message: 'Password not supplied.' });
    if (req.body.password.length === 0) return res.json({ success: false, message: 'Password not supplied.' });

    passport.authenticate('admin', function(err, admin, info) {
        if (!admin) return res.json({ success: false, message: info.message });
        req.logIn(admin, function(err) {
            if (err) return res.json({ success: false, message: 'Server error.', reason: err });
            console.log('user:');
            console.log(req.user); // both users and admins go here
            console.log('admin:');
            console.log(req.admin); // undefined
            res.json({ success: true });
        });
    })(req, res, next);

});

In fact, I was following the answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/21898892/1830420, and Matthew Payne gets two session variables: req.user and req.sponsor. In my case, even if an admin authenticates, it gets written to req.user. Now, trying to implement my client's desire of totally separating users and admins, I want to get req.user and req.admin, but every time it gets written to req.user. I thought changing LocalStrategy name would help, but passport.js seems to ignore both the strategy name and model name.

Any help is very much appreciated.

P.S. I know I can have everyone in User model and write some middleware to protect certain routes based on roles, but then again, unfortunately, I don't get to choose here.

Answer 1

Unfortunately you can't do that with Passport. You will need to create express middleware to handle admin authentication.