ORY Kratos ExpressJS Self-Service UI Reference

This is an exemplary Self Service UI for ORY Kratos Self Service features:

• Registration
• Login
• Logout
• User settings
  • Update profile
  • Change password
• Password reset
• ORY Kratos user error page

Additionally:

• Dashboard (requires login)

Configuration

This application can be configured using two environment variables:

• KRATOS_ADMIN_URL (required): The URL where ORY Kratos's Admin API is located at. If this app and ORY Kratos are running in the same private network, this should be the private network address (e.g. kratos-admin.svc.cluster.local).
• KRATOS_PUBLIC_URL (required): The URL where ORY Kratos's Public API is located at. If this app and ORY Kratos are running in the same private network, this should be the private network address (e.g. kratos-public.svc.cluster.local).
• BASE_URL (optional): The base url of this app. If served e.g. behind a proxy or via GitHub pages this would be the path, e.g. https://mywebsite.com/kratos-selfservice-ui-node/. Must be absolute!
• TLS_CERT_PATH (optional): Path to certificate file. Should be set up together with TLS_KEY_PATH to enable HTTPS.
• TLS_KEY_PATH (optional): Path to key file Should be set up together with TLS_CERT_PATH to enable HTTPS.

Network Setup

This application works in two set ups:

• Standalone
• With the ORY Oathkeeper Reverse Proxy

Standalone

This is the easiest mode as it requires no additional set up. This app runs on port :4455 and ORY Kratos on the specified KRATOS_ADMIN_URL, KRATOS_PUBLIC_URL URLs.

This mode relies on the browser's ability to send cookies regardless of the port. Cookies set for 127.0.0.1:4433 will thus also be sent when requesting 127.0.0.1:4455. For environments where applications run on separate subdomains, check out Multi-Domain Cookies

To authenticate incoming requests, this app uses ORY Kratos' whoami API to check whether the session is valid or not.

To enable this mode, set the environment variable SECURITY_MODE=cookie or leave it empty.

With Oathkeeper using JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

This mode requires ORY Oathkeeper to route all incoming traffic to either ORY Kratos or this app. It is expected that no browser traffic can reach this app or ORY Kratos directly. To check out the full guide, head over to Zero Trust with IAP Proxy.

This app then expects ORY Oathkeeper to use the id_token mutator which is a JSON Web Token this app validates in order to figure out if a request is authorized (logged in) or not.

To enable this mode, set the environment variable SECURITY_MODE=jwt. Additionally these two environment variables must be set:

• JWKS_URL: This URL contains the JSON Web Key Sets ("jwks") that can be used to verify the JSON Web Tokens. When using ORY Oathkeeper, you should point this URL to ORY Oathkeeper's JWKS API (the API port, not the proxy port!), e.g. https://my-oathkeeper-api/.well-known/jwks.json.
• KRATOS_BROWSER_URL: The URL where ORY Kratos's public API is located, when accessible from the public internet via ORY Oathkeeper. This could be for example http://kratos.my-app.com/.

Development

To run this app with dummy data and no real connection to ORY Kratos, use:

$ NODE_ENV=stub npm start

Test with ORY Kratos

The easiest way to test this app with a local installation of ORY Kratos is to use SECURITY_MODE=cookie and have the ORY Kratos Quickstart running. This is what that would look like:

# start the quickstart using docker compose as explained in the tutorial: https://www.ory.sh/kratos/docs/quickstart/
export SECURITY_MODE=cookie
export KRATOS_BROWSER_URL=http://127.0.0.1:4433/
export KRATOS_PUBLIC_URL=http://127.0.0.1:4433/
export KRATOS_ADMIN_URL=http://127.0.0.1:4434/
export PORT=4455

# In ORY Kratos run the quickstart:
#
#   make quickstart-dev
# 
# Next you need to kill the docker container that runs this app in order to free the ports:
#
#   docker kill kratos_kratos-selfservice-ui-node_1

npm start

Update TypeScript SDK

If you've made changes to the ORY Kratos API you may want to manually generate the TypeScript SDK in order for URLs and payloads to work as expected. It is expected that you start this guide from this project's root, wherever you checked it out. You also need to have the openapi-generator installed.

# Set path to kratos:
export KRATOS_DIR=/path/to/kratos
make build-sdk

Building the Docker Image

# Set path to kratos:
export KRATOS_DIR=/path/to/kratos
make build-sdk-docker

Clean up

make clean-sdk