Question: I try to authenticate http requests via username and password. The authentication seems to work. But for some reason the user data is not available inside the express routes. Related Stackoverflow questions are pointing to problems in the session setup. But I followed this tutorial (https://www.passportjs.org/tutorials/password/) and can not see what I am doing wrong.

Related Stack Question that did not help me:

• Unable to access req.user in Passport.js on Express.js
• NodeJS Express Passport – req.user is undefined

Git-Repo (with back and frontend for testing): https://github.com/quentinkrammer/stack-express-local-passport.git

Broken Backend Code:

import express from "express";
import session from "express-session";
import memoryStore from "memorystore";
import passport from "passport";
import { Strategy as LocalStrategy } from "passport-local";

const MemoryStore = memoryStore(session);
const store = new MemoryStore({
  checkPeriod: 3600000,
});

passport.use(
  new LocalStrategy(function verify(username, password, cb) {
    if (username === "Jim" && password === "123") {
      console.log("Local Strategy - SUCCESS");
      const user = { user: "Jim", role: "Admin", id: "42" };
      return cb(null, user);
    }
    console.log("Local Strategy - FAILED");
    return cb(null, false, { message: "Incorrect username or password." });
  }),
);
passport.serializeUser(function (user, cb) {
  console.log("Serializer: ", user);
  cb(null, user);
});
passport.deserializeUser(function (user, cb) {
  console.log("DeserializeUser: ", user);
  cb(null, user as Record<string, string>);
});

const authRouter = express.Router();
authRouter.post(
  "/login",
  passport.authenticate("local", {
    failureMessage: true,
    failureRedirect: "/notAuthed",
  }),
  function (req, res) {
    console.log(
      "Successfull authentication - User: ",
      JSON.stringify(req.user),
    );
    res.redirect("/authed");
  },
);
authRouter.get("/authed", function (req, res, next) {
  // Question: Why is the user undefined? I need the user to do authorization :(
  console.log("authRouter - User: ", JSON.stringify(req.user)); // req.user = undefined
  res.json("Login successfull");
});
authRouter.get("/notAuthed", function (req, res, next) {
  res.json("Login failed");
});

const app = express();
app.use(cors({ origin: "*" }));
app.use(express.urlencoded({ extended: false }));
app.use(
  session({
    secret: "keyboard cat",
    resave: false,
    cookie: { maxAge: 3600000 },
    store,
    // not sure if this is needed
    saveUninitialized: false,
  }),
);
app.use(passport.authenticate("session"));
app.use("/", authRouter);
app.listen(3000);

Backend Console.log: