Upgrading Angular Symfony in 10 Steps

Introduction

In 2013 I got some free time and provided a bootstrap project for people who wanted to create a website with a Rest API based on Symfony 2 and AngularJS. Back in the day, the project attracted some attention and some contributors begun to work on it too. It was more and more forked. But, for  lack of time, I couldn’t maintain the project and upgrade to the new software versions. So it got very outdated.

The good thing is that I took a moment to upgrade the project recently to Symfony 4 and Angular 8. So yes it was a very big gap between the software but because of the very limited size of the project it wasn’t so much of a pain. In the process I’ve learned some tricks that I wanted to share with you.

In order to make things clear I want to remember that the project use Web Service Security standard for API communication and use the REST protocol.

You might want to have the project opened in another window in order to fully follow the steps to upgrade : https://github.com/FlyersWeb/angular-symfony.

Preamble

The project use a technique called WS-Security UserToken in order to authenticate the connected user. You can have a detailed explanation by going to OASIS specifications : https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/13392/wss-v1.1-spec-pr-UsernameTokenProfile-01.htm.

The simplified process is as follow :

• client access the shared secret by authenticating with the server
• client generate a user token by using a nonce (random string), a created (date time) and a secret (shared with the server)
• client send a token with a different nonce for each subsequent query

The server knows at which date time the token was created, it also can detect replay attack if the nonce is sent twice and it can authenticate the client through the shared secret.

Now that we had a quick refresh let’s dive in the upgrade process.

Upgrade Node

The project was using NodeJS 5 and we upgraded it to NodeJS 12. Because it is a big gap, we better started a new Angular 8 project from scratch based on webpack.

Upgrade PHP

The project was using PHP 5 and we upgraded it to PHP 7. There were a lot of breaking changes and some real improvements between these two versions so we also started a new project from scratch using Symfony 4.

Upgrade Angular

Between AngularJS and Angular 8 there is an abyss. The frameworks are so different that it was easier to start over a new project by copy/pasting the important parts of the algorithm. It was also a good exercise to add some improvements to the existing code.

This is how we removed a useless custom Base64 encoding function and preferred the CryptoJS version.

I’ve been searching online and didn’t get any direct usage of a Base64 encoding using CryptoJS, this is how I did it :

CryptoJS.enc.Utf8.parse(nonce).toString(CryptoJS.enc.Base64);

You first need to parse your string using the correct encoding then use the toString function specifying the Base64 output.

We also removed the custom random string function and added the ‘random-string’ dependency. FYI there is a ‘randomstring’ dependency but it didn’t work on my laptop saying that there is no global defined, maybe the NodeJS version break something for that dependency.

The Angular structure totally changed but you can find all the interesting parts in the ‘token.service.ts’ file.

Upgrade Symfony

Same as before, the gap between Symfony 2 and Symfony 4, was so big that we just started a new project from scratch. The implementation of the WS-Security UserToken is available in the official Symfony documentation https://symfony.com/doc/4.4/security/custom_authentication_provider.html.

The implementation we used is exactly the same. FYI, the regular expression to parse the X-WSSE header wasn’t working because of escaped double quote coming from Symfony request headers. Besides that it’s all the same.

It was also a good excuse for some improvements, so we preferred the use of Nelmio/CORS in lieu of a custom request listener for Cross Origin Request. We added FOS/FOSRestBundle to manage the REST API part more easily and upgraded the FOS/FOSUserBundle dependency.

Thing is, this last dependency is not fully compatible with Symfony 4 so we had to use some tricks to make it work. So while you’re installing the dependency by following the instructions you might have to.

First, move the configuration to ‘config/packages/fos_user.yaml’. Second, add the FOSUserBundle routes definitions to ‘config/routes/fos_user.yaml’.

Finally, we generated a migration and created the User entity in database using the following command :  

bin/console doctrine:migrations:diff && bin/console doctrine:schema:update –force’

Additionally we decided to set logs to stderr because the project is dockerized. This way you can have logs in real time in your docker daemon. To do that it was necessary to update ‘monolog.yaml’ configurations to use ‘php://stderr’.

Upgrade database

While working on the project I decided to migrate the existing MySQL database to PostgreSQL. Because PostgreSQL is such an amazing project, being so powerful and well maintained. I do think that MySQL might have reached this quality without all the commercial fuzz around it, but that is another story.

So moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL was actually really easy on this project, we just had to install the correct database, add pdo_psql to PHP and update the connection URL in ‘.env’. I really loved the new way to configure Symfony 4 it make it a breeze.

We also decided to improve a little the project by adding doctrine fixture for the sample user for the demo.

Staying connected

To be able to stay connected after a page refresh, we had to use the localStorage to store the token generation data. This way we can come back to our client and still be connected. Tokens have a lifetime of 5 minutes.

You can change this lifetime in the ‘WsseProvider.php’ file if necessary.

Update docker configuration

By upgrading so much of the project, we could actually make some significant improvements to docker configuration. On the Angular part, the building and watch mode process is now natively supported. On the Symfony part, the NGINX configuration through PHP-FPM was also much easier without necessity for custom configuration anymore. You can have a look to it in the dockerify folder containing the ‘docker-compose.yml’ infrastructure and the nginx configuration files.

Please be aware that the project is in development mode with watch mode activated, it is not suited for production deployment as is. The idea is more to offer a bootstrap project for developers to begin working on their project with authentication out of the box. You might have to configure your own Continuous Delivery System for deployments.

Update License

To finish the License was also upgraded to MIT License. So you're free to use, modify and/or redistribute this software. The README was also upgraded with latest installation instructions.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading, I hope that the project will be useful to you. You should have a look to the README at https://github.com/FlyersWeb/angular-symfony for more details.