WebAPI.JWTAuth.Template

This is a ASP.NET Core Project Template for quickly scaffolding an application with JWT-based user authentication and background workers scheduled using cron expressions.

By default it uses an in-memory database but can easily be swapped to any database provider supported by Entity Framework Core.

How to use

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Create a folder for your project and change directory to that folder.
3. Install the template from NuGet: dotnet new -i busyfingers.JWTauth.WebAPITemplate
4. Create project using the template: dotnet new busyfingers.webapi.jwtauth

Routes

Route	Method	Auth required	Description
/api/users	GET	Yes	Lists all users
/api/users/x	GET	Yes	Fetch information for user with id x
/api/users/x	PUT	Yes	Update user with id x
/api/users/x	DELETE	Yes	Delete user with id x
/api/users/register	POST	No	Register new user
/api/users/authenticate	POST	No	Authenticate user

Payloads

Register user

{
	"FirstName": "John",
	"LastName": "Doe",
	"Username": "john",
	"Password": "qwerty123"
}

It is possible to require a specific signup code to restrict registration. If required, the signup code is provided via the querystring with the parameter name ``signupCode```. See below for more information on how to configure this.

Authenticate

{
	"Username": "john",
	"Password": "qwerty123"
}

The response will contain a token that is valid for 30 minutes. This token must be included in the header when requesting the routes that require authorization (see table above).

Application configuration

There are several configurations available, the only mandatory one is the hashingsecret, which is provided via the command line when starting the app.

Configuration	Description
hashingsecret	The string used to hash the user passwords
signupcode	A code that must be provided when registering a new user (default is none)
urls	Explicitly sets the address the app will listen to, e.g. https://192.168.1.255 or https://mydomain.com
certfile	Path to the HTTPS certificate file, e.g. "mycert.pfx"
certpass	The HTTPS certificate password

Background worker schedule configuration

To configure the schedule for a background worker, simply add a key-value pair in the section CronSettings in appsettings.json, where the key name is the same as the background worker class (the implementation) and the value is the cron expression. The template contains a worker implementation that compresses the logs older than today and puts them in an archive folder. The class is named ArchiveLogs and is configured like so:

  ...
  "CronSettings": {
    "ArchiveLogs": "59 23 * * *"
  },
  ...

This will compress the logs at 23:59 every day.

Credits

• The JWT Authorization and user management is based on this excellent blog post by Jason Watmore: http://jasonwatmore.com/post/2018/06/26/aspnet-core-21-simple-api-for-authentication-registration-and-user-management
• The Background Worker implementation is based on this great blog post by Maarten Balliauw: https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2017/08/01/building-a-scheduled-cache-updater-in-aspnet-core-2.html