About the Course

Introduction

Several years ago, I wrote a web application for a client in the CodeIgniter PHP framework. At the time, CodeIgniter didn’t include a built-in authentication system. I did what any good developer does and went on the hunt for a well-made library to supply authentication capabilities. To my chagrin, I fail to find any concise libraries that fit my needs. Thus began my journey of creating Ion Auth, a simple authentication library for CodeIgniter, and a career-long crusade to secure web applications for myself and other developers.

Now, many have moved to other frameworks or languages, but basic security is often overlooked. Let’s fix that. Let’s avoid the horror of leaked user passwords, malicious SQL into your database or any other avoidable hacks.

This course is short with handbook-style references to specific items that can better secure your application. You can complete it in a couple of hours and then reference later as needed. And let’s have some fun in the process.

Format

Lines starting with a dollar sign

$ ls -al

are examples of using the command line as a normal user.

Lines starting with a pound sign

# ls -al

are examples of using the command line as the root user.

Server command-line examples will assume some type of *nixA Unix-like operating system (CentOS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, OSX, etc.) operating system.

Code Examples

All of the examples are in JS unless otherwise noted. I will use vanilla Node.js code where possible, even if it creates more boilerplate. I’ll also be recommending many NPM packages. If I cannot explain in vanilla Node.js succinctly, I will use the Express framework since it has a simple syntax and should be easy to understand.

Some of the code examples are broken up for a better explanation. To view complete code examples, refer to my Github repository.

Let’s do this.