oidc-client re-released

As part of building IdentityServer, we felt it was important to have lots of sample code to show how a developer can build client applications. And of course given the interoperability goal of OIDC, SPA-style JavaScript applications should be one of those samples.

When I started building our sample I found that there was no OIDC client JavaScript library out there (several OAuth2 ones, and vendor-specific ones, but not a pure OIDC protocol library). Of course, necessity is the mother of invention so I started working on one for our sample. This sample grew into a couple of ad-hoc libraries which were known as the OidcClient and TokenManger libraries. I even spoke about them at NDC last year.

Unfortunately, as samples tend to be turned into libraries on an as-needed basis, the organic nature of the evolution means that sometimes the code is not as well planned out and organized (or just not as pretty) as one would like it to be. I was called out for this several months ago, so with some corporate and community support I endeavored to re-write the library and clean it up using more modern techniques and tools.

Over the past 2 or 3 months I have rewritten the prior two libraries. They are now consolidated into one library, written in ES6, transpiled with babel, packed with webpack, built with gulp, and unit tested with mocha and chai. I feel pretty hip saying all those buzzwords in a single sentence, but I digress. In addition to the re-write, I’ve added a few more features and cleaned up existing ones.

So I’m quite happy to have released the rewritten and enhanced oidc-client this morning to npm. If you’re building a SPA style JavaScript application and need to handle authentication and calling secure web APIs using tokens from OIDC and OAuth2, try it out.

Feedback welcome. Enjoy.