Warn On Requests, Throttled

⚠️ Experimental, don't use yet.

This package implements an ExpressJS middleware to warn about arbitrary properties of requests.

By default, the warning will be logged to the console. A warning can, however, do anything, e.g. call a web hook, or send an HTTP request elsewhere etc.

Example

This middleware came to existance in order to warn when JWT tokens are almost expired.

Such warning can be created when a JWT token (or anything else warn-worthy) is encountered in a request. However, warning on every request would result in a flood of warnings, unless throttled. This package solves this.

A (throttled) warning when encountering an almost expired token can be implemented like this:

const express = require('express');
const expressWarn = require('express-warn');

const app = express();

/* we need some jwt middleware (in this example), and we expect "req.token"
 * to be populated by the middleware
 */
const jwt = ...

/* We further assume the token to have properties "userId" and
 * "iat" (compare https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7519#section-4.1.6).
 */

const warn = expressWarn({
  keyFn: req => req.token.userId,
  throttleMillis: 60000, // defaults to 10000 (10 seconds)
  warningFn: req => {
    const { iat, userId } = req.token;
    const now = new Date().getTime() / 1000;
    const slack = 60 /* minutes */ * 60;
    if (iat + slack > now) {
      return [ `token of user ${userId} expiring soon` ];
    }
    return undefined
  }
});

// the route(s) now use both the jwt and the warn middleware
app.get('/protected', jwt, warn, (req, res, next) => {
  res.send('Here is protected information: abc')
})

If, instead of just logging the warning on the console, we want to call a web hook or similar, we can do so (e.g. via the request package):

...
const warn = expressWarn({
  ...
  log: (...args: Array<any>) => {
    request.post(
      'https://my-host.com/warnings',
      {
        body: {
          warning: args
        }
      }
    );
  }
})

Chris927/express-warn

Warn On Requests, Throttled

Example